Art & Context 101
This guide includes information about the fine art prints on the 9th floor of Wells Library at Indiana University Bloomington. Use the resources on each page to uncover how art reflects the society in which it was created.
Articles
- Femmes Artistes Modernes: Women, art, and modern identity in interwar FranceA complicated and somewhat mysterious figure in early 20th century art, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is often referred to as the "Mama of Dada."
- Claude McKay: Black protest in western traditional formExamines Claude McKay's poetry, which uses the sonnet form to articulate his opposition to White American prejudices and his resultant ambivalence toward his country.
Question: What does this Jamaican poet have in common with this German artist?
The materials from IU Libraries can help us answer questions like these. Use the links on this page to learn more about Claude McKay's and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's dadaist interests.
Books from IUCAT
Body Sweats by Call Number: World Wide WebISBN: 9780262016223Publication Date: 2011The first major collection of poetry written in English by the flabbergasting and flamboyant Baroness Elsa, "the first American Dada." As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven left in her wake a ripple that is becoming a rip--one hundred years after she exploded onto the New York art scene. As an agent provocateur within New York's modernist revolution, "the first American Dada" not only dressed and behaved with purposeful outrageousness, but she set an example that went well beyond the eccentric divas of the twenty-first century, including her conceptual descendant, Lady Gaga. Her delirious verse flabbergasted New Yorkers as much as her flamboyant persona. As a poet, she was profane and playfully obscene, imagining a farting God, and transforming her contemporary Marcel Duchamp into M'ars (my arse). With its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, her poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself. Her love poetry muses graphically on ejaculation, orgasm, and oral sex. When she tired of existing words, she created new ones: "phalluspistol," "spinsterlollipop," "kissambushed." The Baroness's rebellious, highly sexed howls prefigured the Beats; her intensity and psychological complexity anticipates the poetic utterances of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Published more than a century after her arrival in New York, Body Sweats is the first major collection of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poems in English. The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and coeditor Suzanne Zelazo have assembled 150 poems, most of them never before published. Many of the poems are themselves art objects, decorated in red and green ink, adorned with sketches and diagrams, presented with the same visceral immediacy they had when they were composed.
Cutting Performances by Call Number: PN2193.E86 H37 2010ISBN: 9780472117185Publication Date: 2010"A thoughtful and engaging contribution to the field that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood, as well as on how feminist histories and historiographies continue to challenge and transform the larger field of performance." ---Charlotte Canning, The University of Texas at Austin
Refer to the chapter titled "
Nude descending Bleecker Street: Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven and performing gender in New York dada"
A Long Way from Home by Call Number: World Wide WebISBN: 9780813539676Publication Date: 2007Claude McKay (1889-1948) was one of the most prolific and sophisticated African American writers of the early twentieth century. A Jamaican-born author of poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction, McKay has often been associated with the "New Negro" or Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American art, culture, and intellectualism between World War I and the Great Depression. But his relationship to the movement was complex. Literally absent from Harlem during that period, he devoted most of his time to traveling through Europe, Russia, and Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. His active participation in Communist groups and the radical Left also encouraged certain opinions on race and class that strained his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance and its black intelligentsia. In his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, McKay explains what it means to be a black "rebel sojourner" and presents one of the first unflattering, yet informative, expos#65533;s of the Harlem Renaissance. Reprinted here with a critical introduction by Gene Andrew Jarrett, this book will challenge readers to rethink McKay's articulation of identity, art, race, and politics and situate these topics in terms of his oeuvre and his literary contemporaries between the world wars.
Complete Poems of Claude McKay by Call Number: World Wide WebISBN: 0252028821Publication Date: 2004Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism.McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.
The art of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven by Call Number: N6888.F746 A4 2002Publication Date: 2002An exhibition catalog from an exhibit held 25 April-15 June 2002, at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, Fine Arts Building.
