Frank O'Hara's New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism: Perfectly Disgraceful (Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series)

Frank O'Hara's New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism offers a ground-breaking account of the poet Frank O'Hara and the extraordinary cultural blossoming O'Hara catalysed, namely the mid-century experimental and multi-disciplinary arts scene, the New York School. Fresh accounts of canonical figures (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire) and original work on those too little discussed (Edwin Denby, Elaine de Kooning) resound with analysis of queer iconology from Michelangelo's David to James Dean. Sam Ladkin argues that O'Hara and the New York School revive Mannerism. Turning away from interpretations of O'Hara's Transcendentalism, Romanticism, or pastoralism, 'mid-century Mannerism' helps explain O'Hara's self-conscious style, its play with sweet and grand grace, contortion of conventional measure, risks with affectation, conceits, nonchalance, and scrambling of high/low culture. Mannerism clarifies the sociability implicit in the formal innovations of the New York School. The work also studies the kinship between art mediums by retooling rhetoric and recovering a perennial manneristic tendency beyond period style. Genealogies of grace, the figura serpentinata , sprezzatura , ornatus , and the marvellous exemplify qualities exhibited by O'Hara's New York School. Ladkin relates the essential role of dance in the New York School. O'Hara's reception has been tied to painting, predominantly Abstract Expressionism. He was also, however, a balletomane, a fan, for whom ballet was 'made up exclusively of qualities which other arts only aspire to in order to be truly modern.' Relaying ballet's Mannerist origins and aesthetics, and demonstrating its influence alongside Broadway and Hollywood musical-dance on art and poetry, completes the portrait of mid-century modernity. Cover Frank O’Hara’s New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism: Perfectly Disgraceful Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Contents Permissions Image Permissions List of Illustrations Epilogue Preface The Paragone of the New York School Introduction: New York School Mannerisms Mannerism The Interdisciplinary Rhetoric of Maniera A Genealogy of Rhetoric Chapter Summaries 1. Sprezzatura: Diligent Negligence You Just Go on Your Nerve The Renaissance of Sprezzatura Disgrace Difficulty The Difficulty of Death The Difficulty of Love: Lost Time The Difficulty of Love: Distraction The Difficulty of Love: Disquiet The Art of Diligent Negligence Injudicious Affectation Denoting Camp Sprezzatura and Race: ‘The Successful Syndrome of the Cool’ 2. Grace: ‘Joyous Irony in Tenderest Pathos’ In Public, In Private A Step Away from Them The Consubstantiation of Grace Elegy Balanchine’s Poetics The Flight of the Dancer: The Transcendental Bach in Bathing Suits: The Constructivist Balanchine’s Elephant Ballet: The Vernacular Some Thoughts About Classicism and George Balanchine A Genealogy of Grace Unconscious Grace and Grace of Irony 3. Agon: ‘The Energy of Contradictory Actions’ Three Moments of Agonism: Classical, Mannerist, and Mid-Century Renato Poggioli’s Avant-GardeAgon Nietzsche’s Agon Agonal Communities of Taste The New York School of the 1930s The Pindaric Three Sides of ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’ 4. Figura Serpentinata: ‘And Now it is the Serpent’s Turn’ Figura Serpentinata Queer Figures The Cancerous Statue The Serpent Rhetorical Turns 5. Frank Speech: ‘The Living Ought to be Alive in Every Part’ Ornate Poetics Paul Valéry: The Order of the Serpent Frank Speech Explosive Grief and Anger The Sun’s Motto To Hell with Content Apostrophe or Invocation ‘It’ 6. Marvellous: 'Remember Life’s Marvellous’ Forms in Motion and in Thought The Prosody of ‘Ode to Joy’ The Poetry of ‘Ode to Joy’ The Mannerist Sublime Where Air Is Flesh Ode on Causality Our Tempestuous Rights Coca-ColaCarpe Diem Conclusion: ‘Style at its Highest Ebb is Personality’ Bibliography Index