About the American Salons Web Project

Click on any clock face to return to the Modernism Homepage.

Desk clock 1932-33 designed by Gilbert Rhode (American 1894-1944) for Herman Miller Company, Michigan.

 


"Modernism: The Salons" is the Website of a graduate seminar in the English Department during the fall semester of 1997. "Salons" is chiefly a schematic for organizing discussion of and research about a movement that was disparate in its sources and locations, not to mention its membership. The seminar focuses on the visual sources of American Modernist authors, ranging from the photographs of Steiglitz and Man Ray to the painting of Stuart Davis, Pablo Picasso and Marsden Hartley, to the films of D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, to the industrial design and architecture of New York and Chicago. Our interest is in the way the new visual culture influenced such authors as Ezra Pound, Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Willian Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, H. D., Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. Since many of the writers and artists knew each other (or of each other's work), the cross-linking capacity of a Web site seemed an ideal way for students to refer to each other's work and to a common library of visual influences.



 

We invite additions to this project from interested scholars elsewhere. Due to the far-sighted and flexible structure created for the site by Kevin LaCamera and Jenifer Wolkowski, it can grow for a long time. We are committed to maintaining the project and to extending it as interest warrants. Please contact us if you are interested in submitting your work, cross-linking or pursuing a similar project.



 

William Marling

Professor

Department of English

Case Western Reserve University