News | September 10, 2024

Greenwich Village Counterculture Chronicled at New York Public Library

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.

Jessie Tarbox Beals, Washington Mews, [1918], photographic postcard

Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 at the NYPL will focus on the extraordinary rise and fall of the first large-scale countercultural enclave in the United States.

Highlights from the exhibition which opens October 12 and runs through February 1, 2025,  will include:

  • rare editions of influential Village-based little magazines such as OthersThe DialThe GlebeThe Little ReviewThe Seven ArtsThe Pagan, and Rogue
  • photographs of notable Villagers by Jessie Tarbox Beals, including portraits of Merton Clivette, Romany Marie, Tiny Tim, and Bobby Edwards, as well as photographs of popular Village hangouts, including the Washington Square Bookshop, the Samovar, Polly’s restaurant, and Hotel Brevoort
  • a broadside advertising an Emma Goldman lecture on birth control held at Carnegie Hall
  • first editions of John Reed’s and Louise Bryant’s firsthand accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, published respectively as Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and Six Red Months in Russia (1918)
  • first edition printings of The Provincetown Plays (1916), series I–III
  • the April 1920 issue of The Little Review that occasioned the Ulysses obscenity trial
  • original costume design drawings for a performance of the Greenwich Village Follies (1920)

Greenwich Village's bohemian scene of the 1910s and 1920s was a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and radical political activism, attracting and nurturing a who's who of cutting-edge artistic, literary, and intellectual talent,” Michael Inman, Susan Jaffe Tane Curator of Rare Books at The New York Public Library, said. “Influential in its own time, it also served as a template for future American countercultures and avant-gardes.”

Emma Goldman and Hippolyte Havel (Authors) Anarchism and Other Essays New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910
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General Research Division, New York Public Library.

Emma Goldman and Hippolyte Havel, Anarchism and Other Essays, New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910

While the Village soon developed a reputation as a bohemian utopia and epicenter of the avant-garde, its stint as a cradle of nonconformism was short-lived - the United States’s entry into the First World War signaled the imminent demise of its initial age of artistic and societal rebellion.

Additional highlights among the approximately 140 works drawn from across The New York Public Library  include:

  • works by William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Alfred Kreymborg, Marguerite Zorach, and John Sloan
  • a first edition of Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), published by Albert and Charles Boni
  • a photograph of the May 1913 suffrage parade in New York City, which was, in part, organized and led by several prominent Villagers
  • the program from the June 1913 Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, which was held at Madison Square Garden
  • an issue of Guido Bruno’s Bruno’s Weekly (1916s)
  • a poster advertising a 1917 bohemian costume held at Webster Hall