Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

This crisp and accessible work offers both a penetrating reconstruction of the 1934 American productions of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts and a delightful study of an unprecedented artistic collaboration--involving not only Stein and Thomson, but a large cast of supporting characters. From arbiters of taste like Carl Van Vechten to the society hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan to the plucky, well-connected band of Harvard-trained art professionals who eventually set "the course of 'official' modernist culture in America's most prestigious institutions for nearly half a century," Steven Watson tracks the improbable development of an audience for a quintessentially American opera that happened to be set in Spain, peopled by nuns and saints, and staged with an all-black cast performing an incoherent story in front of combustible sets. Along the way, Watson illuminates the larger history of modernism in Paris and New York between the wars, as well as many smaller histories, like the growth of museums in America and the influence of high bohemia on the worlds of fashion and design. --Regina Marler