Body and Soul

February 28, 2000
This hefty, posthumous study is an ambitious, intensive look at a brief period of American culture, spanning the domains of visual art, literature and music. Following up the author's two previous volumes covering the century's early years, this book devotes chapters to the usual suspects with a smattering of lesser-knowns: photographers Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz; artists Charles Sheeler and Georgia O'Keeffe; writers Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway; composers Edgard Varese and George Antheil; and Theosophical architect Claude Bragdon. Most are biographical narratives using secondary sources to discuss how these creators evolved new kinds of artistic expression, while a final section, titled "The Varieties of Religious Experience," juxtaposes chapters on the spiritual attitudes of writers like Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens and Lincoln Kirstein. As is natural with such a wide-ranging study, the author's expertise is not equal on all subjects. Crunden, who was a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin until his death last March, sticks to solid sources for literature and art, but often goes awry on music, dismissing composers of the stature of Milhaud, Poulenc and Honegger as "three moderately gifted experimenters," to give one of the milder examples. Nevertheless, chapters on Little Review editor Margaret Anderson and novelist and journalist Carl Van Vechten stand out, demonstrating an open-mindedness on the contributions of minorities in gender, sexuality and race to modernist art. But the book as a whole lacks the kind of strong, primary source-based perspective needed to ground convincing conclusions about modernism among the various art forms.