Not Unprecedented
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COMMENTS
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Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)
"the true heirs of the 1913 spirit, in its broadly human engagement, Dorothy Day and William Carlos Williams: those who stayed where they were, both literally and figuratively...and found their work there... They stayed loyal to the engagement our main subjects repudiated; they insisted on combining a spiritual project, in art or politics, with ordinary, local, or traditional commitments—either combining the practice of art with action in service of their fellow men, or combining the agitation for political change with preservation of traditional religious forms and ceremonies."
(p. 253)
"He [William Carlos Williams] took important clues from French painting: "For a hundred years one of the cleanest, most alert and fecund avenues of human endeavor, a positive point of intellectual assistance from which work may depart in any direction." But he also insisted on American subject matter and an Americanist and macho ideology. ...he combined some of the most advanced aesthetic ideas of the Armory Show with some cultural ideas that were retrograde already in 1913.
But one thing which works powerfully to redeem him, even as an artist, is his medical practice in Rutherford. Like Chekhov, he found practical work parallel with his writing, and vice versa. "As a writer I have been a physician, and as a physician a writer." This tied him to ordinary experience, and for this there was a close equivalent in the life of Dorothy Day, which makes the big city scene belong to them, and not to Duchamp at all, from most points of view. Williams says, "And my medicine was the thing which gained me entrance to these secret gardens of the self. It lay there, another world, in the self. I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor defeated body into those gulfs and grottos . . ." He saw one and half million [sic] patients, and delivered two thousand babies, by his count, between 1910 and 1951.
(p. 257)
(more)
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