Baroque Modernity by Joseph Cermatori;

Author:Joseph Cermatori;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

“To Mount It Up”—Baroque Citationality on Stage

Upon entering the Wadsworth Atheneum’s newly built theater in Hartford, Connecticut, for the 1934 premiere of Four Saints, spectators received a printed program made of pink paper and black Spanish lace that set the tone for the events to follow. For its frontispiece, this program featured a photograph of Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy (ca. 1650) along with a lengthy excerpt from Richard Crashaw’s hymn to Saint Teresa (also ca. 1650), “The Flaming Heart.”8 These baroque intertexts were no accident. Stein came to be situated alongside Bernini and Crashaw in this way, in no small part, through the influence of the Atheneum’s new chief curator, Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin (1900–1957). In the seven years since his appointment as museum director at age twenty-seven, Austin had sought to focus the museum’s collecting on two then-undervalued fields of European painting—the same two art-historical periods that were his lifelong passion, namely, the modernist and the baroque. He had already curated the first major American exhibition of Italian baroque paintings, in 1930.9 Through his efforts, a new awareness of baroque visual art had come sharply into focus among American museumgoers and collectors. On the occasion of Four Saints’ premiere, Austin also inaugurated the Atheneum’s newly completed Avery Memorial Wing, which he had arranged to be built in the austere International Style, and at whose center he had placed an enormous sculpture of Venus, dated 1600, by Pietro Francavilla (1548–1615). The opening-night audience passed through this space while entering the first American retrospective of Picasso’s paintings, before heading to the museum’s auditorium for the opera premiere.10 By 1934, Austin had established his reputation by juxtaposing early modern artworks alongside modernist ones. He served as Four Saints in Three Acts’ host not only in his capacity as museum director but also as its financing producer in his role as founder of the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music (established 1928), a society devoted to programming music by composers both modern (Stravinsky, Satie, Schoenberg) and baroque (Vivaldi, Couperin, Scarlatti). Juxtaposing recent and historical artworks in this way, the museum effectively suggested a historical allegory between the two, highlighting their shared investment in formal experimentation and unexpected shock effects.11

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