Radicals and Rogues
The Women Who Made New York Modern
by Lottie Whalen (Reaktion, ISBN 9781789147865) reaktionbooks.co.uk
In 1917, a reporter for the New York declared that ‘women were the cause of modernism, whatever that is’. The sociable, intellectually curious, and sexually available modern woman permeated discourse around the emergence of contemporary art in the US. Women’s entanglement in a male-dominated art world played upon the stereotype of the hostess, or at once a provider of maternal hospitality and a cunning administrator of art world alliances. The salon constituted a highly socialized form of consensus-building, gatekeeping, and exclusion.