Happy new year!

Not a bad way to start 2021 - the Metropolitan Museum of Art's page-a-day calendar for the year begins with a study for one of the murals Thomas Hart Benton was crafting for The New School ninety years ago. It's for one of the two murals dedicated to 'City Activities' - activities we fervently hope will come back strong, even stronger, in the new year!

Down in the world

Possibly my penultimate Faculty Senate meeting (we have one more, next week). Not sure if I'll stand for reelection... I took this picture for an unrelated reason - we were meeting in what was once the Benton Room. With colorless art and drab folding tables, what a dreary change!

Prosit!

The Met's 2018 New York in Art Engagement Book ends with Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" murals, passing the torch to the New School for our centennial year! Let's hope there's much else to celebrate, too.

Vertical

Extra, extra, read all about it! The first article in our "vertical" series on New School histories in the university's online journal Public Seminar was published today! The formatting leaves a little to be desired (I'd really hoped the whole clipping would be shown, not just a slice), but at least the Thomas Hart Benton room is seen again as New School's own.

History of a school for social research

The coming year is a big one for New School history. Not just for The New School, which celebrates its centenary in 2019, but for my friend J and me, who have been the go-to people on the school's history for many years, and will have new opportunities to share what we've found. We'll be teaching a graduate course in Historical Studies in the Fall, and putting together a series of online presentations on interesting aspects of The New School - perhaps with podcasts! (We received a Provost's Office Innovations in Education Grant for the latter.)

Most excitingly, we'll be editing a "vertical" in the New School-based online journal Public Seminar on "New School Histories," which will involve writing or commissioning at least forty shortish articles over a year-and-a-half long period. This is most exciting because it's likely to reach the most people, and because the Public Seminar context (its modest brief: "Confronting Fundamental Problem of the Human Condition and Pressing Problems of the Day") invites us at every point to show the broader significance of local histories. Because we're not part of the official Marketing and Development-led festivities, we're free to be intellectual about New School's complicated legacies, telling difficult as well as pleasing stories - indeed telling multiple conflicting stories rather than one. We'll raise critical, future-oriented questions about our history, and through them about the ideals The New School and its family of institutions have sought to embody.

Not on our agenda: how we spent a century being "new"!

Image from a book I picked up in Bloomington:

Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals (2008, orig. 2000), 8

Murals

Indiana has a set of Thomas Hart Benton murals, too! An originally 230 foot tableau of the 'Social History of Indiana' for the 1933 Chicago International Exposition is now spread over three buildings at IU, most of them in the 1941 auditorium whose vestibule was designed to house them. Hard to snap!

Obstructed view

Well, I wouldn't be a scholar if I didn't also tell you when one of my hypotheses is disproved. The certificate below (found here) decisively disconfirms my excited hunch that people inside the Benton Room could see the lights of lower Manhattan - its windows are south-facing - which then somehow resonated with the city scenes on the walls facing the windows and even seemed to spark with the energy coursing along the aluminum-painted frames. Sorry folks (well, mainly, sorry fantasizing me), by the time The New School opened its 12th St. building, the 9-story building directly to its south had already been there for 6 years. The Benton room was on the 5th floor: open and shut case. Pity, though.

Spatializing the Benton room

Talking to my friend J today about finally seeing the Thomas Hart Benton murals at the Met on Monday, I was able to complete some thoughts which started forming there... though the complete thoughts take the form of questions. As I mentioned, you don't quite feel the closure of the murals in the current display, which - understandably - lets viewers flow through the room to other galleries. (I'd briefly hoped, when someone in one of their videos reminds us that the Met is a museum full of period rooms, that they might do that here too.)

But still, being able to get close to them and feel their energy, is huge. I felt for the first time how overpowering it must have been to see Benton's figures tensed, stretched, bent, reaching and dancing behind the heads of the people sitting across the original board room table from you! (I recall the effect of seeing people against its companion Orozco murals for reference.) Not to mention all the machines doing their turbocharged thing. Old photos from the day, being black and white,

don't prepare you for the explosive color. These wide-angle shots also don't give you any sense of just how small the room feels, when its walls are aquiver practically floor-to-ceiling with mural with special illumination coming from under a dark red ceiling, the presumably black doors shut. I told you I got the squeeze-like connection of the murals by holding my hands up to block the exits where the windows would have been, but now I wonder what work the windows performed in the

 

original space. We know the curtains were clear blue, but now I want to know what view they let in - or didn't - and so the questions begin. What did one see out the window, by day and - even more, since it was a night school - at night? Could it be one saw the skyline of lower Manhattan by day, its lights by night? If so, the electric charge exploding from the central "Instruments of Power" mural will have claimed that sparkling new landscape as it careened back into the room. And the big
city scenes on the wall facing the window would have been balanced and amplified by the city itself. Yes, amplified is the word. Energy will have been coursing around the room, not just (as in individual panels) up and down, into the depth and back. And those amazing 3-D aluminum lightning spurs, glancing along mural and window frames before shooting into the paintings... which, it turns out, are older than the specific content of Benton's murals! Without the distractions of its new home in the black-floored cloisters of the Met's American modernism galleries (BTW: is the wooden floor of 510 maybe still the original Benton room floor?!), I'm imagining the space in whole new ways. How do you see it?

Holy Grail

One thing I was chagrined to miss during my year away from New York City was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's special exhibition welcoming Thomas Hart Benton's "American Today" murals to their collection. In anticipation of eventual permanent display in the old Whitney building at some point in the future, the Met reconstructed the room at The New School for Social Research for which the murals were created, for over half a century, defining the spirit of the place. I'm going to be ok. The show (very fine, I'm told) is over, but the murals are still on view: they have a room to themselves in the American modernism section - indeed, they're likely to be the first thing visitors see as they enter. They really are a sight to behold, and my pleasure looking at them mixed happily with that of people discovering them for the first time. Maybe this will turn out to be one of the Met's faves! I was not, of course, discovering for the first time, or even seeing them in the flesh (well, tempera) for the first time. I've been on their scent for over five years, convinced they embody a significant part of what The New School was about, almost completely forgotten. I paid many a visit to the lobby of AXA Equitable a few blocks south of MoMA, where they spent much of the last quarter century, albeit high on a big wall rather than enveloping one in a small space. They're part of J's and my New School history course, naturally; I've also used them in my class on lived religion in NYC, and J and I shared them in a presentation on history and community. (We even saw a lousy movie in which the murals had a short cameo.) The murals were the favored backdrop for publicity scenes -
the way The New School communicated its distinctive character. To get a sense of what the room - 510, now very spare - looked like when the murals were there, I even taught myself Google Sketch-Up and made a 3-D model. I confess to being a little obsessed, even possessed...
So what was it like, seeing the murals up close and personal? Almost perfect. I noticed how the pieces fit together, how the amazing aluminum frame-like spurs - like bolts of lightning - animate and unify the work. I discerned that the murals were meant to be seen from

sitting (they were for a conference room, later used for classes and events). I discovered that the woman in the City Scene with the preacher, burlesque, boxers, etc., has her eyes closed - she may be the only figure not in motion. As I sat near the middle of the room, facing the more stylized "Instruments of Power," I suddenly found myself imagining what it was like when the francophone scholars of the Ecole Libre met here - I imagined being just feet from them, just a few feet more from the paintings crowding us with a big American embrace.
In fact, the experience of being in that room must have been heady, more than a little claustrophobic. You don't quite get that in their present display, where the doors and windows open to other galleries. (Also the ceiling is a little too high, and the lighting different from the original - this isn't quite one of the Met's period rooms.) But I found that if I held my two fists up on either side of "Instruments of Power" while standing in the entry the murals swiftly wrapped themselves around me, a quite overpowering experience. You try too: it's room 909.

Meanwhile back on the farm...

One Nebraskan president-emeritus of The New School has been promoting the memory of another. The New School's first president Alvin Johnson has been inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame, and a short television profile has recently been produced. It's interesting enough ("Nebraska's Schindler" has always "a farmer at heart"!), but what really excites me is footage from an old film I've never seen which includes not only a view down 12th Street with the Sixth Avenue L but Johnson and the University in Exile crew in discussion in the Benton Room!!

Monumental waste of time

There's one reason to see the film "The Monuments Men," and that is that our beloved Thomas Hart Benton murals appear in it. They are, as you know, one of my passions, and it's fascinating to me that on their way to the Met they came to be used in a scene of a New York bar in 1943. (The scene at right with Benton's Hallelujah Lassie doesn't even appear in the film.) There is, alas, no other reason to see the film: none.

SciFi

Science fiction writer extraordinaire Kim Stanley Robinson reading from his newest book and sharing some of his consistently brilliant insights:

He defines science fiction, a genre he's "patriotic" about, as recounting "histories we can never know" - futures which might unfold (like the thoroughly realized world of 2312, when humans have rendered many other planets and moons of our solar system habitable by "terraforming," and have also speciated into several sizes and a panoply of genders), counterfactual pasts (like world history had the Black Death wiped out the population of Europe in The Years of Rice and Salt) or stories of the unknowable past (the new novel Shaman takes place 30,000 years ago). I'm persuaded that it's a serious form of moral critique and imagination.

New School colors

In our New School history course today we talked about the modern arts - dance, music, architecture - as forms of "social research": efforts less to be beautiful or useful than to better frame and seek ways of addressing the questions of the modern age. I got to talk about my old flame, the Thomas Hart Benton murals, but also about the building as part of which they were painted - Joseph Urban's modernist building at 66 West 12th Street. Nowadays it's rather dark and unremarkable, but in its time it was electric - literally and figuratively. Looking at Urban's plans and early representations we find not a dark building in serious black and white (but for the crazily out of place orange and grey of the auditorium) - that would be international style - but a facade nearly white and an interior (which would spill out through the unbroken horizontal bars of windows, especially at night) full of boldest colors. An article about the new building by Rita Susswein (you can find it in the third of the New School scrapbooks, page 72)makes clear that the walls and even the ceilings of classrooms were painted in reds, oranges, yellows and greens. In Urban's words, the colors made the spaces dynamic, "contrasting filled spaces and void space" exploding the "monotony" of "box-like" rooms with imagination and emotion. I can't find any representations of these rooms, or of the sight of the New School at night, but at least a few students are joining my quixotic quest to find out what colors were used - and who decided to paint them over in the current white. Only one image have I been able to find, but it confirms the marvel which was Urban's multi-color palace of modernity - the dance studio built beneath the auditorium. Spectacular, no? And guess what - the box in the Joseph Urban collection in Columbia's rare books room from whence this came appears to contain eighteen more color sketches and watercolors. Since some of the interested students are in Parsons, we might end up with a beautiful way of sharing or even recreating these spaces! (I'm dancing already.)

Apotheosis!

My babies, the murals Thomas Hart Benton painted for the New School, are moving up in the world, or at least uptown. They won't be on display until 2015, in what is now the Whitney Museum. But it's something to look forward to. A space I've worked for years to give people a sense of will soon be a space they can actually enter! For the meantime, the Met has a lovely video recreating the space - minus only the specially designed lighting fixtures, furniture and the view of the skyline through the blue curtains - much higher res here than in the Times article.

Room for more

More for the Benton files - a picture from a playwriting class, circa 1941, with Tennessee Williams (left) and Arthur Miller (right).

Benton in Orozco!

Multiversity

I think we did the three-ring circus of The New School proud today. With the help of one of our teaching assistants, we brilliantly conveyed the school at its early 40s apogee. The show began with these two images -

the familiar modernist auditorium repurposed as a theater by Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and the familiar Benton room playing host to a seminar (doubtless in French) by the École Libre des Hautes Études' Henri Bonnet. The point was not that earlier things had been displaced but precisely the opposite. The Dramatic Workshop and École Libre joined an already vigorous set of overlapping institutions. Alvin Johnson insisted that all the faculty of University in Exile (Graduate Faculty) teach a course in the Adult Education program each year. Piscator required all his theater students to take night courses there, too.

The École and the Dramatic Workshop are lesser known parts of New School history, as they did not last. The École, founded as a French/Belgian university in exile in 1942, severed connections with The New School in 1947 and helped build up the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. (A remnant remained in New York, too, at least through 1967.) And the Dramatic Workshop, established in 1940, was shut down after a decade, ostensibly for economic reasons. Piscator returned to Europe when called to testify before HUAC.

The many splendored New School of the early 1940s can be a bit hard to get a handle on. Had the place lost focus? Indeed, there were more entities than just the Adult Division, Graduate Faculty, École and Dramatic Workshop. The Graduate Faculty had spawned an autonomous Institute of World Affairs. And the Adult Division had created a Senior College in anticipation of the BAs it would offer starting in 1944 to returning GIs, itself divided into a School of Politics (dean Hans Simons) and a School of Philosophy and Liberal Arts (dean Clara Mayer - yes!). People at the time must have wondered if The New School had exploded, too, as Alvin Johnson in a December 1943 Bulletin wrote:

 

I had a theory about what Johnson meant by "true American" here - more than obligatory profession of patriotic commitment required for a group of emigrés during wartime (though there was that, too). The key was Horace Kallen's ideas of pluralism, as Johnson explained in 1946:
The New School was flourishing and, far from being diluted or disturbed by new divisions, it was living out its key idea - the "acceptancc with eager interest" of "multiplicity" of approaches and genres. If this hadn't been the central idea of the founders, so much the worse for them. Over the course of its first quarter-century, The New School had demonstrated that an institution might be stronger for being truly pluralistic in structure. How else would the "creative process" learn to outgrow received views?

Our teaching assistant R provided a lovely illustration of the fruits of such pluralism from within the École Libre. It involves these gentlemen,

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structural linguist Roman Jakobson - both rather younger during their École Libre years. Lévi-Strauss (who died in 2009; imagine if, like Marc Bloch, he had not escaped the Nazis but died in 1944?) did not know Jakobson but attended his lectures at the École and realized he was an unwitting structuralist. Jakobson returned the favor, attending Lévi-Strauss' lectures on kinship, confirming the affinity - then recommended Lévi-Strauss write a book about it. Elementary Forms of Kinship was written in his studio on 11th Street off Sixth Avenue, and the discipline of anthropology was changed. Would this have happened without the École Libre and the interdisciplinary example of its Kallenist host The New School?


The cavalcade continued with my colleague J's account of the arts, social research and politics at The New School before and during the years Piscator spent here. The Group Theater (above) taught in the mid-1930s. The  communist-inspired First American Artists Congress Against War and Fascism also took place there. Arts as social research has been one of our central themes in the class thus far, but J took it up a notch by contrasting it with political art ("art as politics") like Piscator's agitprop of the 1920s, and with the applied art of the school led by Frank Parsons (which joined The New School family in 1970).

Political art used the arts to convey political messages. Applied arts took classical and European forms and adapted them to the demands of modern American life. But New School artists we've seen, from Cowell to Humphrey to Benton to Abbott, start with modern urban life and its problems, developing art forms to express its energy and its challenges.

Should I perhaps not describe this period, when artists and scholars of many disciplines and ideologies taught and wrote in many languages, as The New School's apogee? Does not that imply that it was all downhill from there? Perhaps. I can hear our new historians Robinson and Beard warning against nostalgia!

It's not clear that the rest of the New School's 20th century was just a routinization of the charisma of the first quarter-century. Exciting new ventures came and went, and the school institutionalized, managing in our own time to look enough like a conventional university to attract thousands of full-time students and employ hundreds of full-time faculty. It may still contain the Kallenist spark (which may itself have been less than entirely deliberate), but not if we think that it has all this while been trying to "become a university." At a time when "the university" is under fire as archaic and unaffordable, our gamble is that understanding the ongoing experiment of The New School will make us all more creative social researchers, thinking pluralistically outside the boxes of disciplines and monolithic academic institutions.

We all laughed when our past president paid some Mad Men to rebrand us and they came up with "The New School: A University." What else should we be, we scoffed, a bar and lounge? a pita bread? a scent? But they may have been onto something, if unwittingly. Long may the experiment go on! "For a time it even resembled a university," one imagines someone in the future saying; "Even Homer nods!"

Wish us luck telling the rest of this story!

Picturing The New School

I opened today's session of New School Century with a 1931 snibbet from a newspaper in Danish (or is it Norwegian?). (See leaf 19 of scrapbook 4.) On my first skim of the scrapbooks I exulted in our being important enough to be written about in Europe, but attention to the ads makes clear that this is a New York newspaper (the name is lost), a reminder of what a polyglot city this has always been. It confirms also that The New School was of interest not just to one or two communities in the City.
The list of classes being offered at The New School is pretty awesome too - and this snibbet includes only Torsdag and Fredag! Robert Frost on poetry, Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture, Sidney Hook and Horace Kallen on philosophy, Doris Humphrey and John Martin on dance, among others, and one Thomas H. Benton on "Craftsmanship and Art." That Benton is, of course, the muralist of my favorite lost New School space. Here's the Benton muraled conference room on the 5th floor in 1931.

You've seen the colors of the murals, but I've learned that the overall effect was brighter still, with a varnished walnut floor, black-lacquer furniture and walls, a russet-red ceiling surrounded by subtle lights, and curtains in cerulian blue. In any case, I argued, along with a few other spaces like the Orozco Room two floors up, this room was the most distinctive of The New School and its engaged worldly ethos, and so came to represent the distinctiveness of The New School experience.

It certainly will have produced an enveloping experience whether for discussions or lectures (more so than the Orozco-muraled cafeteria, whose figures are not life-size and in your space, but abstracted and located at eye level and above). It was the ideal setting for showing that the refugee intellectuals of the University in Exile were indeed in America. And in promotional materials for the BA program and the Institute of Retired Professionals from the early 1960s, the Benton Room showed that this was no ordinary school, with ordinary rooms. Later, in the Seminar College and early Eugene Lang College, the Benton Room was where the life- and community-defining orientation (later called "tally") happened - here copies of catalogs from each of them.

 

When the murals were sold (mainly to raise money, but also for conservationist reasons, as they were suffering from scuffing as people leaned chairs back against them, and suffused with cigarette smoke), part of New School identity went with it.

One of the readings for class was from Berenice Abbott's A Guide to Better Photography, yet another important popularizing book which grew out of a course at The New School. Abbott is, indeed, credited with creating the country's first photography program at The New School, starting in 1935. Abbott is encouraging to her readers - anyone can be a photographer - but doesn't downplay the hard work of taking better photographs. A good photographer works with what she knows, and composes her shot to let the truth of the object show. Abbott illustrated this with two pictures she took of the NY Stock Exchange.
The first was taken on a weekend, since traffic made setting up a tripod hard on a weekday, but the building was in shadow and the street deserted. She returned and returned to the spot until she found out when the light was on the facade just right - just twenty minutes each day! - and when the flag was hoisted - only holidays. In the end she persuaded the president of the Stock Exchange to have it hoisted just for her, since on holidays the street is deserted, too. For the bigger problem was people: when there was too much traffic she couldn't take a picture, but an empty street won't work, for two reasons.

Human activity, flow of crowds in the narrow street, was needed to offset that static neoclassic facade ... Most of all, of course, the Stock Market without feverish human movement is totally uncharacteristic. (25)

The characteristic feverish movement takes place inside the building, but a photo even of the outside has to convey it somehow if it is to be an effective portrait of the Stock Exchange! The resulting image shows a concatenation of light, people, cars, flag which, in fact, never happens, but it became iconic because it shows the true life of the building.

We asked the students what picture they would take to show what's characteristic of The New School... You can see why the Benton Room was so much photographed to represent us: it brought the busy world into the classroom - sort of the obverse of what Abbott did in her Stock Market portrait. I'll let you know what they come up with!

A clean well-lighted place

 

In the New School scrapbooks there's an article from Lighting Magazine in 1931, featuring the advanced lighting of the new building. Included are pictures not only of my crush, the Benton Room (above) but the lecture hall where The New School Century is happening 81 years later!

Artful

Today's session of New School Century was about the arts and/as social research. We started class in the Orozco Room, and, back in our classroom, did a little dancing. The arts have arrived in our class!

The Orozco Room was originally a public cafeteria but is now used only for special events (ostensibly for preservation reasons). Created by José Clemente Orozco for the New School's first building in 1931, it plays an important and distorting role in our collective memory. Most people know that a yellow curtain was drawn across the Lenin-Stalin mural in 1953 to student protest, but not that the internationalist peasant-revolutionary Orozco murals had from the start a pendant in the American modernist and industrialization-high murals by Thomas Hart Benton two floors below: sold in the 1980s, they've vanished from collective memory. You've heard me natter on about this before.

 

But it's time to face the music: what were the arts doing at The New School? The original proposal for a "New School of Social Science for Men and Women" makes no mention of the arts in discussing its mission and intended curriculum. Horace Kallen started lecturing on aesthetics already in 1920, it's true, but there was no indication that by the later 1920s The New School would mainly be offering courses in arts and psychology. This was as or after most of its founders had drifted away, too. What happened? How to tell the story?

 

One version of the story is that after the seven-semester itch The New School lost focus, and offered lectures in whatever students would pay for just to keep from going under. Had students wanted courses in craniology or motorcycle repair we would have offered that. Only with the University in Exile a decade later could it return to itself, a research institute in social sciences. This brutal form of the story appears only by implication, but you hear it a lot. The arts at The New School were an accident, a distraction, if not an embarrassment. Who takes the arts as seriously as social sciences, after all?

A slightly nicer version of the story is that offering courses students would pay for was consistent with at least part of the school's mission, educating adults in new fields, student demand confirming relevance - even if James Harvey Robinson et al didn't imagine that what students would demand would be literature and psychoanalysis and the modern dance. This fits with the Clara Mayer story, too, since it was apparently at her suggestion that courses in psychology and the arts were first introduced.

There's some truth to this "in the meantime we'll offer courses in the arts" story, probably more than I'd like to concede. But the story I'd like to be able to tell (you've heard it already) denies there's any mission drift at all. Surely "social research," what the school was named after, was a broader and more pliable category than "social science," and included in its scope efforts by artists to grapple with the challenge and promise of modern life! Dewey and Kallen were talking about art all the time (Kallen even at The New School!). In support or corroboration of this view one might also consider the way modernists in the arts took on the spirit and terminology of the sciences (laboratory, experimental, method, etc.).

 

I say I'd like to be able to tell this story because it feels, still, sadly, like a a bit of a stretch. But slightly less stretchy and in its way at least as satisfying would be to say that, whatever the reason for the move to arts lectures, the result of offering courses in social sciences and arts together at The New School, especially in the close quarters of the original site in Chelsea, was the discovery of affinities. If the writers of the "Proposal..." didn't see the arts as social research, that's because there wasn't a New School around yet to show them! As you know I sought support for my view in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which included the arts among the areas it covered (admittedly mentioned last among a dozen areas), but that's 1930. I'm willing to consider that the arts wouldn't have been mentioned in 1920, but had demonstrated their relevance by 1930 - especially if the place where that relevance was demonstrated was The New School!

But I'm sure you want to hear about the dancing. One of the new arts introduced at The New School was modern dance, on which the New York Times' John Martin, the first dedicated dance critic in the country, gave "lecture demonstrations" at The New School. He was a critic, not a dancer, so he did the lecturing while dancers (including Martha Graham) did the demonstrating. But my co-teacher J is a dancer as well as a historian, and we're all a little high on Dewey, so we let the students do the demonstrating!

Asking half of the class to line up along each of the walls flanking the lecture hall, J told students they were to notice their bodies as they moved, as well as those of the students facing them across the room. First we all spread our feet (first position), arched our hands over our heads, and rose to our toes. This was the feel of ballet, dignified, straight, solid-torso, elevated. Then we placed our feet parallel, bent our knees and contracted as if someone had hit us in the stomach. The modern dance, grounded, rounded, twisting the torso, expressive...

Martin's lectures-demonstrations were both an explanation of the modern dance and advocacy for it. Many thought it ugly and too serious - wasn't dance supposed to be beautiful and lighthearted? - but in his lectures (and the book which grew out of them (The Modern Dance, 1933) he suggested that dance expresses things we cannot put in words, some of them among the most important things. In modern life dance has become a mere pastime, and we have forgotten its true significance.

 

In his lectures as also in his article on Dance for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (...yes of course!) Martin discussed the role of dance in "savage" societies, and suggested that, in the face of the discoveries of modern time (think Robinson's Mind in the Making, etc.), serious dance was becoming necessary again.

Whenever the primitive mind came into contact with something that happened without his having had anything to do with it, something with the element of mystery and supernaturalism, he danced. ... As time went on these dances in many cases became traditional, and if we were astute enough and perceptive enough (which we are not) we could find in these rituals an incomparable treasure, for they are really the record of man's discovery of nature. Few of them survive to-day, however, and those that do have become too stereotyped to offer us sufficient clue to work upon. ... Nevertheless, this spirit is the animating spirit of the modern dance. ... Civilisation has taken the mystery out of ordinary life to a great extent and consequently has mitigated the necessity for expressing, as the primitive dancer did, the things one's understanding cannot grasp. But to-day we are reaching farther and farther ahead into uncharted regions of thought, which, though not alarming to us as nature was to the savage, are just as far from being reducible to rational terms. And it is these grasped but intangible emotional and mental experiences that the dancer of to-day finds himself forced to express through the irrational medium of bodily movement. (The Modern Dance, 9-10)

One of the legends of The New School is that Martha Graham was important here, indeed that she and Aaron Copland developed "Appalachian Spring" here. Not true - they'd both moved on from The New School by that time. But another modern dancer was much more important to the New School's experiments in art as social research: Doris Humphrey, whose work J introduced us to (and whose pictures I've posting here, including her Shaker-inspired piece). There are interesting tie-ins to social questions, too, as, J suggested, Graham's work is about the individual vs. society, but Humphrey's is always about relating to others; even where there is a leader she emerges from and returns to the group. The body expresses itself but seeks harmony with others.

Movement research as social research! If the social scientists didn't experience the importance of this, I say so much the worse for them!