Street Scene

Abstract

The close relation between modernism and urban life has been evident since the time of modernism itself. Their material links are innumerable, but, as Raymond Williams observes, one central connection stands out: “The most important general element of the innovations in [modernist] form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis.”1 Migrations, elective or otherwise, drove increasing numbers of people to cities, where they found themselves at the heart of modern urban ferment, but also as outsiders. Two recent studies illuminate this connection in highly site-specific ways. Andrew Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City and Sara Blair’s How the Other Half Looks both make immigrant mobility central to their accounts of modernism. For Thacker, tracing the movement of writers and artists through several iconic European cities reveals how the dynamic circulation of the era’s transportation technologies brings artists together in urban spaces and fuels their formal aesthetic experiments. For Blair, the influx of immigrants to New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned one particular neighborhood into an embodiment of modernity, and shaped the representational claims of media trying to capture it. Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City offers an overview of modernism in four crucial European cities. As one of Edinburgh University Press’s Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series, the book has a daunting charge: to trace major historical and institutional contexts for modernism in each city as well as address a wide range of writers rather than a few exemplary authors. A scholar of modernism and space, as modernism / modernity