Through what mechanism is the cultural landscape of a place understood? What assurances or warnings about its capacity for forward movement have already been issued for those who would listen? How can these insights be of value to those who would later inherit the place?
During the years 1927-1944, Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. stood at the cultural center of a small, conservative city, and called the winds of change to blow through it. As director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut during this period, he served as a nexus point, bringing artists and thinkers from around the world to converge with the city. From his privileged position as a white man of means, at a time when these characteristics were prerequisites for success, Austin enjoyed a degree of freedom and security that many others could not claim. At the same time, he was among a group of men, and women, who used their position to circulate ideas from the margins of society into the mainstream, sometimes despite themselves. Austin championed Modernism and the work of living artists through the programming he initiated at the Wadsworth. Further, the building of a performance venue within the museum during his tenure provided an important platform as his passion for modern art objects blossomed into advocacy for modern performance.
His interest in the interdisciplinary nature of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, its role in the modernization of classical ballet, and his association with Lincoln Kirsten, led Austin to sponsor George Balanchine ’s immigration to the United States in 1933. While the intended goal of establishing a national ballet school in Hartford was an ill-fated plan, Balanchine’s first performances in the United States would debut at the Wadsworth’s Avery Memorial Theater in later years. Four Saints in Three Acts, a Virgil Thomson opera with libretto by Gertrude Stein, premiered on that same stage in 1934 with its all black cast, a year before Porgy and Bess arrived on New York stages. In that same year, Truda Kaschmann, a dance artist trained by Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban arrived in Hartford to escape Hitler’s Germany. By 1938, in collaboration with her student, Alwin Nikolais and composer Ernst Krenek, she premiered Eight Column Line, a work which would propel Nikolais onto the national stage and establish her as the matriarch of modern dance in Hartford.
Ironically, Austin is not the ultimate goal of this investigation. Instead, he is one in an intended series of case studies, offering a window into the city’s legacy, habits, and potentiality. It has been said that the past is an important indicator of future outcomes. If this is true, Austin’s tenure at the Wadsworth was inevitably shaped by the city’s existing character and history. In turn, Austin’s work as the museum’s director also etched an indelible mark on Hartford, which is still felt in the present day. By examining existing patterns, one may lift a haze from the community’s understanding of its own cultural landscape, empowering current inhabitants to claim its legacy and contribute to the city’s next strain of cultural DNA. This paper will consider how Austin arrived at the center and will give attention to three of his key curatorial encounters with performance, noting the relationships formed between the societal centers and the margins. In the end, the intended goal is to emerge with new insight into the place as a result of the legacy left by this important period of cultural vitality.
Setting the Stage
“And now here you are in Hartford, come like a fairy prince to awaken a sleeping city to a sense of beauty, breaking the spell that binds us as you win the Princess for your bride” (qtd. in Magician 113).
—Trinity College’s President Ogilby to A. Everett Austin upon his marriage to Helen Goodwin in 1929
The Wadsworth Atheneum, the country’s oldest public art museum, was founded in 1841. Charles Goodwin, grandson of the founder and “a scion of Connecticut’s colonial aristocracy” (Magician 66), was elected its president in 1925. By this time, the Wadsworth had long been a physical manifestation of the region’s conservative expectations of art and art institutions, a cultural bastion for the city’s ruling class. When it was time to hire a new museum director, Charles Goodwin sought the time tested expertise of Edward Waldo Forbes. Forbes was the Director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum and was, “[f]or his favored students … an astute career counselor” (Magician 66). To the Wadsworth, Forbes offered Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. as an ideal candidate. Austin had graduated from Harvard College in 1924 where he had been Forbes’s teaching assistant. During that time and since then, the once directionless young man had traveled extensively to study art in Europe and the Mayan ruins of Mexico, and had worked on archaeological expeditions in Egypt and the Sudan. Forbes agreed to provide transitional support as Advisory Director and promised that Austin, best known by the nickname “Chick” since childhood, would bring his charm, good looks, “brains and good taste” to the insurance capital (Magician 69, Weber 136). Austin began his term of service at the Wadsworth Atheneum in October 1927. He was young, only 26 years old, and he wasted no time sweeping clean the cobwebs from the museum’s respectable, but adventureless reputation.
While Hartford was an established center for industry and manufacturing, New England tastes were conservative. The mainstream did not yet consider modern ideas about technology, the human psyche, or the world’s evolving social order to be legitimate influences shaping the visual arts (Magician 76-77). “What people expected of art was the faithful and precise representation of nature. They demanded evidence of ancient standards for technical competence, and of traditional training (Weber 51). Austin, however, had no intention of perpetuating the status quo. He had encountered works by the ancients, the masters and the modern innovators around the world, and he intended to bring that world to Hartford. Addressing the press in the weeks following his arrival in the city, Austin proclaimed:
It is our object to bring to this city … important art objects of every sort, and men and women prominent in the world of art. … In time we hope that the Wadsworth Atheneum will attract these people to Hartford as the art center of New England… By gradually building up the collections at the Atheneum, as we plan to do, visiting Europeans scholars and connoisseurs … will find it necessary to come to Hartford, and so the reputation of Hartford’s artistic vitality will spread even to the foreign cultural centers (qtd. in Gaddis 82-83).
Within months of his arrival, Austin had planned his first ambitious season of exhibitions and programs. It would include Paul Sachs’s collection of drawings, a vast exhibition featuring works from ancient to modern, three major painting acquisitions by European masters, and a grand ball inspired by a Venetian Fête. By the end of 1928, Austin was able to report a significant increase in museum attendance and subscriptions (Annual Report 1928 4-6). However, one senior museum trustee spoke for many in the group as he met Austin’s pronouncement with, “Mr. Austin, do you think it wise to have the general public rampaging through our museum” (qtd. in Magician 123)? Undaunted by this display of narrow-minded elitism, Austin persisted in bringing the masses through the museum doors and in contact with art of the time. Austin understood that in order for his institution to provide the thorough education he felt was the museum’s responsibility, he would have to bring a wide range of art and historic periods before the public.
While museums in larger cities around the country had been careful to give their attention to established artists who had stood the test of time, Austin exhibited both established and contemporary work. Where contemporary art was concerned, he believed:
It is the duty of a museum to show … the manifestations of the art which is living, and which is being produced around us, the very moment almost, that we are observing it. So also it is the duty, nay, the passionate interest of the intellectual mind to observe all these manifestations. Whether to like them or dislike them is another matter, but to see them is all important (qtd. in Magician 85).
He made his intention clear by quickly instituting a comprehensive lecture series for both public school children and adult residents of the city, and he began teaching the first art history courses at Trinity College. In 1928 he created “The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music,” a subscription society devoted to promoting the work of contemporary composers. That same year he invited the public to explore the modern design of his own renovated apartment. In April 1929, Austin presented a film series which featured several works, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Méchanique, which were pushing the boundaries of the still young genre (Magician 129). That same year, in honor of the opening of the Museum of Modern Art, and with assistance from Alfred Barr and Lizzie Bliss, Austin launched an exhibition called Selected Contemporary French Paintings featuring works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Chagall, Modigliani, and others (Magician 128). In 1931, Austin presented the first Surrealist show in America, which he called, Newer Super-Realism (Weber 159). During his 17 years at the Wadsworth, Austin would present exhibits featuring art in the Baroque style, modern artists from Picasso and Dali to Calder and Modigliani, American Negro Artists, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House and much more. He served as mentor to James Thrall Soby, a wealthy Hartford suburbanite turned collector of modern art, and later curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He engaged the public, appeared on local radio and provided a platform for a wide range of local artists and organizations. Austin understood that in a city like Hartford, he had to be more than a museum director. In many ways, in order to achieve the success he envisioned, it was necessary that he curate the entire city.
When he filled the position at the Atheneum, Austin was forced to work within the boundaries of what he had inherited. The building, its trustees, and its environment were established long before his arrival. Fortunately, in those early years, Austin was masterful in his ability to fill existing structures with new ideas. As early as 1928, however, plans for a museum extension had been initiated (Avery 19). Here, as the museum’s director overseeing the design of the new wing, Austin had the opportunity to make a fresh mark on an as yet unencumbered facet of the Wadsworth. In both design and intended use, “he saw his one great chance to create the most advanced museum in America” (Magician 171). “On February 6, 1934, the doors of the Avery Memorial opened on America’s first International Style museum interior and on its first Picasso retrospective” (Avery 35). Not only did the new wing provide much needed gallery space for the museum’s growing permanent collection and Austin’s ravenous cycle of large loan exhibitions, the building now housed a theater. His movement back and forth through history, from classic to modern objects, offered a formidable challenge to many of Hartford’s museum goers. However, it was on the Avery Memorial Theater stage that Austin expanded that challenge to include the experiential arena, where all art forms could converge in performance.
Ballet for Our Time and Place: The Hartford Catastrophe
“Just say Proceed or Impossible. If Impossible, I will try to think of something else—but as I see it—Hartford is perfect. … We have the future in our hands. for Christ’s sake let us honor it.” (Magician 203)
—Lincoln Kirstein’s closing remarks in a letter to Chick Austin
On July 16, 1933, Lincoln Kirstein penned a letter to Chick Austin from London. The oft-quoted single paragraph spanned 16 pages of hotel stationery and spoke enthusiastically of the famed Ballet Russe, Serge Diaghilev, George Balanchine, the prospect of a national school for American ballet in Hartford, the promise of a racially integrated ballet company, a shift in ballet’s social hierarchy, the exploration of American choreographic themes, and an impassioned plea for visa sponsorship and fundraising (Weber 179-80). It was not a hard sell for Austin; he had long since fallen in love with the very idea of Serge Diaghilev when he witnessed the first of many Ballet Russe performances in the summer of 1921. As he later told the Hartford Courant: “To me, his Russian Ballet, with its music by modern composers, its scenery by contemporary painters and its choreography by such great and rare masters as Fokine, Nijinksy, Massine, Nijinska and Balanchine, has been the most intense emotional experience of my life” (Magician 39). He was immediately convinced that the plan was fated and set about securing funds and immigration papers. With the Avery Theater soon to be completed, there could be no better way to christen the space than with a ballet company of its very own.
Leveraging their significant connections, Kirstein and Austin were able to obtain the necessary funds and documents, and on October 18, 1933, George Balanchine arrived on U.S. soil. By the next day he and his business associate, Vladimir Dmitriev, were in Hartford. It was not long, however, before news of his arrival sparked concern throughout Hartford’s existing commercial dance schools. Kirstein’s plan had been built on a non-profit structure that would ensure an artistic focus over a commercial one. But for local dance teachers, this threatened to undermine their loyal student base, and for Balanchine this arrangement suddenly threatened to undervalue his expertise. Despite reassurances from Kirstein and Austin that the venture would pose no threat to local schools, differences remained irreconcilable (Weber 192). The locals understandably sensed a degree of condescension in the assertion that the program at the Wadsworth would be a “cathedral of ballet rather than a dancing school” (Magician 218). In less than a week, Hartford was deemed ill-suited for the project. Balanchine and his team moved on to New York where, by December, the School of American Ballet had opened its doors. Hartford, and Austin were left to lick their wounds. A year later, a concession was made as The American Ballet had its premiere in the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Avery Theater. With such notables as Salvador Dali, George Gershwin and Pavel Tchelitchew in attendance, the program of Balanchine works received glowing reviews and seemed to help heal the cleave left by the split. Later in the year, Austin would further console himself with the acquisition of Serge Lifar’s collection of Ballet Russe drawings and paintings of costumes and sets by notable modern artists (Magician 222).
While it took no time for Austin to redirect his energies toward his next adventure, residue from what Kirstein called the Hartford catastrophe continues to linger in the city in the present day. For those operating in Hartford’s cultural sector, the incident is often treated as a didactic narrative suggesting that, for dance in particular, the city is somehow cursed with a lack of artistic sustainability. However, the incident is not merely a legend intended to infuse the city with a sense of historic drama, however self-deprecating. Beyond the fact that seeds of doubt had long been planted in Kirstein’s mind about Hartford’s viability2, another important detail of the story is often overlooked: the existing dance community had not been considered in the equation. There would, of course, be consequences for acting as cultural missionaries, driven with good intentions to save the uninformed natives, without concern for how the venture would affect the locals. In the typical telling of the tale, villains like the two Angelo sisters and Walter Soby, successful proprietors of commercial dance schools in Hartford, are depicted as provincial and short sighted. While both may be true, it seems no one considered the impact of the project on the long term health of dance in the city. How might their proximity to Balanchine’s work at the Wadsworth, and the proposed development of the art form on American terms, have fed the work of local dance teachers and artists? Would it have offered national legitimacy to their enterprises as well? Should the Wadsworth have forged more meaningful connections with the local dance community, using its proposed ballet program to disseminate the artistic integrity they promised would be at its core? It seems such a discussion never took place, and we’ll never know what the city’s relationship to dance might have been if it had.
Beyond the impact of the event on Hartford, there have also been consequences for dance at large. Kirstein’s original letter to Chick Austin outlined an incredibly progressive plan. The student roster, as he imagined it, would be comprised of 4 white female, 4 white male, 4 black female and 4 black male students all around 16 years old. In 1933, Kirstein was calling for integration for both the school and for the eventual company. Students would not be charged tuition, which would level the playing field for those who would access this world class training. Acceptance would be based on merit not on means. He also seemed to believe the pace of Hartford would allow the artistic integrity of the company to grow organically over time, and that the museum context would place artistic concerns over commercial ones. With the disintegration of the Hartford scheme, some of the project’s philosophical framework seemed to dissipate as well. It is interesting to consider how the current state of dance might be different had Kirstein’s new American ballet been incubated in such an environment of social equality. Instead it would take until 1955 for the New York City Ballet, as Balanchine’s company would come to be called, to hire Arthur Mitchell as its first African American dancer.
Four Saints in Three Acts
“Today the way to designate sophistication in Hartford, Connecticut, is to say one bought, or ate, or saw, something in ‘New York; in 1934, what counted was what people first encountered in Hartford” (Weber 257).
Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein first encountered one another at a gathering in her Paris home in 1925. The young, largely unknown Harvard trained composer had long been a fan of Stein’s writing, and between 1927 and its premiere in 1934, talk of collaboration would blossom into the fully realized opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Drawing inspiration from “the working artist’s life,” Stein saw parallels between the life of the artist and religious devotion (Watson 42). She believed “genius was analogous to sainthood and that artists and writers expressed contemporary spirituality before it appeared in the society at large” (Steven 42). Stein and Thomson would soon turn to Spain, its saints, and Cubism as a framework for the opera. While not literally represented in the resulting work, Spain offered a correlation between this notion of the working artist, Stein’s associations with Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris as expressed in Cubism, her interest in Saint Teresa of Avila, and her trip to Spain in 1912 with her partner Alice Toklas (whom she lovingly called Thérèse). Saint Teresa would become a central character in Four Saints, embodied by two performers, “simultaneously an evocation of Alice and of Stein, the mystic bride of Jesus transformed into the bride of Art” (Watson 44). Stein’s resulting non-narrative libretto forced Thomson to give priority to the aural landscape of rhythm and sound. He too would draw on a variety of associations, matching “Stein’s nonnarrative strategies and absurdist wordplay through an arsenal of musical puns and games”(Barg 126). The result was “a jarring revolution in language wedded to delicate, tuneful, and wryly homespun music … as though the cubists and the Neo-Romantics had eloped” (Magician 186).
In 1928, Virgil Thomson traveled to New York to promote the opera, performing it in several of the city’s influential salons. Key relationships were initiated during that trip, but a venue had not been secured for the opera’s premiere. By the time he returned in 1932, however, the tide had changed. Stein had completed two long works, Stanzas inMeditation and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas during this period. By the next year, the latter work would meet with commercial success, providing a gateway to the popular acknowledgment she had long craved. For Thomson, Stein’s new acclaim would set the stage for the opera to finally be produced. At Austin’s invitation, Thomson performed the work for the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music at the Austin home in Hartford. Enthusiastic about what he had heard, Austin proposed a plan to have the music society sponsor the world premiere of Four Saints in the museum’s Avery Theater once complete (Magician 185). As his role in the development of the American ballet school evaporated, Austin was now free to give his attention to the premiere of Four Saints. He shifted from the ballet to the opera as his focal point for the Avery Memorial’s grand opening, and set about raising necessary funds and finalizing negotiations for the production. When paired with the comprehensive Picasso retrospective he had planned, the new museum wing would emerge, for a time, as a hub for all things modern in the country.
It was also during this visit to America that Thomson made the opera’s now legendary casting decision. As the legend goes, while out with a group of friends at a Harlem café one night, he heard the black performer Jimmy Daniels sing. Taken with Daniel’s showmanship and impeccable enunciation, Thomson proclaimed, “I think I’ll have my opera sung by Negroes” (Magician 186). He reasoned that, “[t]hey alone possess the dignity and the poise, the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of the opera demands” (qtd. in Watson 200). Since the 1920s, Harlem had been established “as the mecca of writers, performers, artists, bohemians and the cosmopolitan chic” (Watson 198). In Harlem’s Eva Jessye Choir and the Savoy Ballroom, Thomson and his collaborators found a worthy group of singers and dancers to fully embody his vision.3
On Tuesday, February 6, 1934 the exodus from New York, or rather the pilgrimage to Hartford began. Neither the bitterly cold temperatures nor the impact of the Great Depression proved to be a deterrent. With an open dress rehearsal for VIPs scheduled for the next day, and the official premiere on February 8, cultural supplicants flocked to Austin’s Hartford cathedral. As much a radical moment for the avant-garde as it was a grand social spectacle, the opera captured the imagination of the national press, and in turn the public.
For many of the art-world luminaries and New York ‘fashionables’ who attended the opening night performance, the collaboration of Thomson-Stein, director John Houseman, artist Florine Stettheimer, choreographer Frederick Ashton, and conductor Alexander Smallens signaled the growing cultural currency of American modernism, heralding its arrival on the world stage (Barg 122).
Everyone involved in the production would make important gains with the success of the opera. In her role as set and costume designer, Stettheimer “became the first America painter to participate in a stage production, extending Sergei Diaghilev’s practice of inviting artists to design sets and costumes” (Watson 6). For Virgil Thomson, Chick Austin and director John Houseman, the opera was a career pinnacle. And as Steven Watson points out: “For the black cast, the opera was a landmark event. Never before had African Americans been cast in a work that did not depict black life. Never before had they been paid for rehearsals. And never before had an all-black cast performed in an opera before white audiences” (Watson 6). On the surface, it would appear that the project was a win-win proposition for all involved. However, for Lisa Barg, author of the essay “Black Voices/White Sound”, Four Saints in Three Acts raises often overlooked questions. Acknowledging the breakthrough experience the project provided for the performers who participated, she poses the provocative question, “What racially mediated relationships and connections between the modern and baroque did the casting propose and perform?” In her search for an answer, the generalized simplicity of Thomson’s rationale for an all black cast, and much of the media’s blind praise, raised far more questions than it answered. Barg brings to light interpretations of the opera informed by the fact that the “racial spectacle crucially mediated perceptions of the work at the time” (Barg 124).
Beyond assumptions about African American’s “superior tonal qualities of voice, including resonance and clarity of enunciation … emotional transparency and spontaneity … and ‘natural’ [physical] eloquence, style, and dignity” (Barg 123), Thomson exposes his own racist inclinations by putting it more plainly to the press: “Negroes objectify themselves very easily … they live on the surface of their consciousness” (qtd. in Watson 202). And yet, unspoken in Thomson’s explanations for the all black casting is the role sexuality may have played in his decision. Barg cites the commonly known convergence of races and sexual expression at nightclubs, drag balls and cabarets in Harlem. Here one could find a safe environment to openly cross boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality.4 Further she addresses the performers’ depiction “as simple, childlike, yet mystical figures, intoning a repetitious stream of nonsensical verse” (Barg 149), drawing parallels between this depiction and “blackface minstrelsy.”5 In this context, the relationship between modernism, purity and primitivism is reinforced as Africanist aesthetics are co-opted in the carefully controlled framework of this white production. Ultimately, it cannot be overlooked that, “[f]or the opera’s urban white audience in 1934, as for its creators, this ‘leap into the irrational world,’ this mysterious fusion of ‘mirth and metaphysics,’ was crucially mediated by and through their coded perceptions of the African American performers” (Barg 133).
Following its successful debut in Hartford, Four Saints in Three Acts would go on to an acclaimed six week Broadway run, forever changing America’s relationship to modern performing arts. As Barg observes,
This was no small claim for a work conceived and composed in Paris, mixing dadaistic aesthetics and musical Americana, all animated by the spectacle of a sizable cast of African American singers and dancers performing as sixteenth-century Spanish saints against a 1,400-square-foot cyclorama backdrop made entirely of cellophane (Barg 121).
Eight Column Line
“We of the modern school do not ask only if a movement is beautiful. No, we ask, first, does it express something? Our dance is emotion translated into movement. And if not all emotions are beautiful, then likewise, some of our movements may be ugly. But they are charged with meaning” (qtd. in Baker D5).
—Truda Kaschmann in an interview with the Hartford Courant in 1935
Throughout Austin’s life, Europe had been the model by which he measured good taste and progress. By the mid-1930s, however, he could no longer deny that Europe was in crisis. Over the course of several summers during the decade, Austin traveled to Europe in order to purchase art for the museum, to stay informed of trends in the field, and to let off steam. Following his return from one such trip in 1935, he shared with the Hartford Times his concern about the impact of fascism on the continent, observing that “[i]n Rome there seem to be as many soldiers as civilians” (Magician 323). In March 1938, Austrian composer, Ernst Krenek wrote Austin from Amsterdam expressing his distress at the German takeover of Austria and the precarious nature of his situation as a result. Austin responded with an invitation from Krenek to give a Friends and Enemies of Modern Music lecture at the Wadsworth that December, and to participate in a larger project the following year. Krenek immigrated to the United States in August, and in December he did offer a small Hartford audience insight into the atonal music he was creating (Magician 330).
As audience sizes for his events were in steady decline, Austin’s proposed project involved the creation a new “ballet” to return to his programming a bit of the luster of earlier years (Magician 331). Krenek would affirm this intention in a letter to Austin in the early planning stages by suggesting, “that the whole thing should be featured as … a dignified continuation of the various extraordinary Hartford performances of the last years.” (Krenek n.pag.) Krenek would compose a new 60 minute work, and recent German émigré Truda Kaschmann and her Southington, Connecticut-born protégé Alwin Nikolais would choreograph and direct. A native of Kassel, Germany, Kaschmann studied modern dance with pioneers, Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman (Dillon 3). In 1933, the Jewish wife and mother fled with her family to the United States, arriving first in Boston, and settling in Hartford in 1934. Upon her arrival in the city, she quickly established relationships within a close-knit group of artists and began teaching German modern dance to actors at the Atheneum. At Austin’s invitation, she had also began teaching movement to his architecture students from Trinity. She was becoming an “integral part of a lively arts oasis that sustained Hartford during the 1930’s” (Dillon 5).
In response to Krenek’s music, and the reality of the times, Kaschmann and Nikolais chose to make an anti-fascist statement with the work, calling it Eight Column Line. The title, the set design by Austin himself, and the characters they created referenced the bold newspaper headlines that daily announced the state of the world. Together Kaschmann and Nikolais devised a work that demonstrated peace and harmony suppressed “by intimidation and ultimately megalomania” (Magician 332). With support from the usual suspects, including Alfred Barr, Lincoln Kirstein and Leonide Massine, Austin raised funds for the new work despite widespread diminished capacity, precipitated by growing tensions in Europe and Asia.
On May 19 and 20, 1939, Eight Column Line premiered to large audiences and was praised for its effective convergence of atonal music and modern movement vocabulary. However, this event was not the spectacle that marked the premiere of Four Saints or Balanchine’s American debut years earlier. No large throngs of New York thrill seekers flooded the city in search of the next big thing. Instead, the impact of this event had a much gentler and, perhaps, more lasting effect on Hartford. For Truda Kaschmann the creation of this work insured the establishment and development of modern dance in Connecticut” (Dillon 13). As noted by her former student and author of a short chronicle of Truda’s life, Carol Dillon makes clear that:
Truda’s early artistic endeavors were nourished in this experimental atmosphere. She … revealed herself to be a dancer and choreographer of unusual talent and exuberance. Her flair for innovation and experimentation and her knowledge of the ‘new modern dance’ … individual creativity, and often primitive movement was quickly embraced by the avant garde community spiraling around her (Dillon 6).
She would spend her summers dancing at Bennington with Jose Limon, Martha Graham and Hanya Holm, with Nikolais in tow, and was responsible for inviting Holm to perform at the Atheneum in 1937. She went on to found dance programs at Hartford College for Women, Miss Porters School and Hartford Conservatory. As both a dance educator and choreographer, she was a important influence on emerging dance artists in the Greater Hartford region for the next four decades.
Her early protégé, Alwin Nikolais, would go on to achieve acclaim as a dance pioneer in his own right. Years later, he credited Kaschmann with setting him on the path: “Truda introduced me to improvisation. … You see Truda established a pattern … that never left me and this is the idea that … a modern dancer, reached fruition through improvisation and creativity, not just technique” (qtd. in Dillon 19-20). Nikolais soon founded his own dance company and established an international reputation as “a master of stage illusion” (Alwin 3), daring to merge dance and technology long before the notion grew to commonplace status among aspiring dance innovators.
In the ten years between Kaschmann’s arrival in Hartford in 1934 and the end of his tenure at the Wadsworth in 1944, Austin also presented Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey, the Martha Graham Company, Anna Sokolow in a solo performance, Erick Hawkins and Pearl Lang, all undoubtedly prompted by Kaschmann. And he would continue to provide a place for her choreographic and teaching work throughout that time as well. In the Wadsworth, Kashmann found a conduit for modern dance which, in time, swelled to encompass the whole city. Today, several of Kaschmann’s students continue to pursue vocations as dance educators and artists, transmitting her legacy to the next generation.
The Threat of Recoil
“One of the most stimulating things about art is that intelligently studied it helps people in thinking for themselves and in developing their powers of selection. In a civilization such as we live in, which does everything in its power to dull personal esthetic judgments by means of the radio, motion pictures, book clubs, and other like instruments, a stimulation of such powers becomes artistically necessary. But unfortunately, significant art, which mirrors for all time the essence of the culture which produced it, is often cast aside for the trivial, the pretty, and the insignificant” (qtd in Magician 131).
—Chick Austin to the Hartford Times in 1929
Chick Austin’s charisma and dogged determination proved contagious to the receptive few, but by the early 1940’s, his lack of business acumen and fiscal responsibility exposed the museum to an undesirable level of risk. Even calculated risk was suspect for the literal and figurative insurance capital, and as enthusiasm for his lavish projects declined with the threat of another World War, Austin’s abandon to his aesthetic whims proved too costly. In 1944, Charles Goodwin led the trustees of the Wadsworth Atheneum in asking Austin to resign his post (Magician 368). Both heartbroken at the loss of an institution he had nurtured so lovingly and relieved to be free of the constraints of the trustees’ increasingly tight grip, Austin languished in a period of transition. But by 1946, Edward Forbes would intercede again by pairing Austin with the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (Magician 372). His new position as Director of the struggling museum, named for the famed circus pioneer, was a fitting assignment for a man who had once been America’s modern art ringmaster.6
Despite its anticlimactic end, Chick Austin’s time at the Wadsworth was marked by innovations that had impact beyond Hartford’s borders. His reach was extensive, and his confidence to act as change agent was fed by his formidable network of affiliations, many of which were cultivated during his time as a student at Harvard College.7 In the early part of the twentieth century, the group of colleagues was engaged in an ongoing discourse about the future of art in America, and Hartford benefited from Austin’s effort to include it in that conversation. He believed in art of the times and worked to transmit that belief to the small city he called home for seventeen years. With his combination of powerful intuition, forward thinking curatorial style, sophisticated tastes, and compelling showmanship, Austin brought the world to Hartford, forcing it to see itself in a global context. In so doing, he set in motion a relationship between the city and creative endeavor that continues to shape its cultural landscape.
It is difficult to assess whether Austin’s work was successful, or if the atmosphere simply contracted to its original state as soon as he was no longer present to forcibly pry it open. What is clear is that, during the years 1927-1944, Chick Austin stood as an amplifier, filter and connector, providing a framework for forward movement. His ability to forge relationships across geographic borders as a remedy to small city isolation, and to act as a zealous advocate of the arts with access to the city’s centers of power, were as critical then as they would be now. Austin used his position to provide a platform for new ideas and new social constructs to be explored in the apparent safety of the performance spectacle, however latent at times. In such an environment, established rules could be suspended, or made subordinate to the imagined one. In the moment of performance, the world was as the artist saw it.
Today, as a resident of Hartford who shares Austin’s stubborn belief in Hartford’s cultural potential, I feel compelled to look to the past in search of clues about the viability of a life in art in this place, searching for answers in such dynamic historic periods as Austin’s own. I am more convinced than ever, that only by continuing to trace the city’s subsequent relationship to art and culture will it be clear whether or not new wine can, in fact, be effectively held in old wine skins.
Notes
1. As Edward Forbes asserted in 1911, “[t]he difficulty is, first, that all modern art is not good, and we wish to maintain a high standard. In having exhibitions of the work of living men we may subject ourselves to various embarrassments” (qtd. in Weber 4). Austin, however, found inspiration for his curatorial practice in the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. The brainchild of fellow Harvardites Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, and John Walker III, the organization, with Forbes’ support, was formed “to exhibit to the public works of living contemporary art whose qualities are still frankly debatable’” (qtd. in Weber 4). In 1929, institutional aloofness toward contemporary art would be further challenged by the founding of the Museum of Modern Art.
2. Author Steven Watson suggests a jockeying for position between Thomson and Kirstein during this time which may have contributed to Kirstein’s easy acquiescence to Balanchine’s idea of abandoning the commitment they had made to Hartford. For a time, Austin’s attention had been drawn away from the opera as he scurried to clear a path for Balanchine right through the doors of the museum. As Thomson struggled to reengage Austin, he had incentive to plant such seeds of doubt, consciously or otherwise. Thomson, while offering contacts and advice questioned Kirstein’s capacity as a ballet impresario (Watson 222-3). It stands to reason that such doubt would later hinder Kirstein’s ability to facilitate Balanchine’s transition to an environment so entirely contrary the one’s he had previously experienced in Europe. In the end, it would prove to be a battle not worth fighting.
3. The costume and set designer, Florine Stettheimer, however, worried that the performers’ varied brown skin tones would dull the brilliant colors of her costumes, so she proposed painting the cast white or silver (Watson 206). This plan persisted for much of the rehearsal period, but fell away by the time of production. Later in response to charges that his opera thematically had nothing to do with black people, Thomson replied, “Think how many opera stars have blackened up to sing Amonasro and Aida. Why can’t my colored singers white up for Four Saints” (qtd. in Watson 200).
4. Barg makes the following point: “Thomson, as is well known, was active in a diverse and extensive transatlantic network of gay and bisexual composers, artists, and their patrons. From its principal actors … to its prestigious art-world supporters [Chick Austin among them] … Four Saints was largely a product of this ‘high bohemian’ subculture. Here Thomson’s fascination with the racial “otherness” of [Jimmy] Daniels’s voice served as an outlet for the projection of a more evanescent dialect: that of the closet” (Barg 138).
5. While Barg makes no claim that Four Saints is a literal expression of minstrelsy, she brings into question the conflict between “deep investment in blackness and its disavowal through parody” (Barg 149), resulting in an inevitable double meaning. From the perspective of Carl Van Vechten, friend to Thomson, advocate for the opera, and proponent of a new Negro chic, it would appear that, “[t]he new Negro was presented as a naturally superior being, more virile, more American, and more spiritual than his white counterpart” (Watson 205).
6. As Austin biographer Eugene Gaddis reminds us that, “[o]n more than one occasion, A. Everett Austin, Jr. … appeared in public dressed in the costume of a ringmaster. Not simply a reflection of his flair for the dramatic, the role was a fitting metaphor for his multiple activities as … connoisseur, teacher, painter, actor, magician, and designer of sets and costumes, Chick Austin was one of America’s most innovative museum directors” (Ringmaster 150).
7. In his book, Patron Saints, author Nicholas Fox Weber follows the threads that connect Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, Agnes Mongan, Chick Austin and James Thrall Soby, concluding that these five under-celebrated individuals were pivotal in the mainstreaming of modern art in America. Steven Watson expands the list to include the more well known Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr., Kirk Askew Jr., Philip Johnson, and Julien Levy. He notes that “[i]n letters to one another, they referred to themselves as ‘The Friends’ or ‘The Family.’ and this suggestion of a sort of cultural mafia was appropriate” (Watson 80).
Works Cited
1928 Annual Report. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum. 1929. Print
“Alwin Nikolais’ Total Theater of Motion.” Vincent Astor Gallery, 2010. Web. 21 Jul. 2012
Baker, Rose M. “An Exiled German Dancer Has Found Sanctuary Here.” The Hartford Courant. 5 May 1935: D3-5. Print
Barg, Lisa. “Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson’s Fours Saints in Three Acts” American Music. Vol. 18, No. 2 (2000): 121-161. Web. 13 Sept. 2012.
“Dance at the WA during AEA, Jr. Years.” Wadsworth Museum Archives. Hartford, CT. Print.
Dillon, Margaret. I Always Wanted to Be a Dancer: The Story of Connecticut Dancer Truda Kaschmann. Hartford: Hartford College for Women, 1983. Print.
Gaddis, Eugene, ed. Avery Memorial: Wadsworth Atheneum. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1983. Print.
Gaddis, Eugene. Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. New York: Knopf, 2000. Print.
Gaddis, Eugene. “Ringmaster at the Museum.” Images from the World Between: The Circus in 20th Century American Art.Ed. Donna Gustafson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. 150-160. Print
Krenek, Ernst. Letter to Chick Austin. New York: 26 Dec. 1938. Print.
Watson, Steven. Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print
Weber, Nicholas Fox. Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to New Art 1928-1943. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print.
