Woodstock Tradition
CHASE, EDWARD T.
Woodstock Tradition The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock By A If Evers Doubleday. 821 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Edward T. Chase Editor; contributor, "Harper's," "Atlantic" Few places have...
...In the spring of 1902, while Whitehead and White were searching for a suitable location in Virginia, Brown explored the Cat-skills...
...His unique contribution, however, is tracing the evolution of the region from pre-Revolutionary times through its growth into a leather-tanning center to the ascendance of Woodstock as an artists colony after World War I. From the Colonial period on, the Catskills seem to have drawn creative people like a magnet...
...It gave us a new sense of freedom...
...To raise money for a new concert hall, White and his followers organized a music festival in 1915...
...Brown, enraptured by the view, asked a white-bearded old man working in an apple orchard the name of "the earthly paradise" stretched out below, and was told "that is Woodstock...
...The selection of Woodstock as the site for this endeavor came about through two American friends, Hervey White, a Chicago writer, and the lithographer Bolton Coit Brown, who was an art professor at Stanford...
...White broke with Whitehead early on, establishing his own offshoot of the Woodstock colony, called "The Maverick," across the valley from Byrdcliffe...
...In the 19th century the area's rugged landscape inspired Thomas Cole and others to romanticize the American wilderness in their paintings...
...From the beginning, Woodstock has been a rare community because of the relationships among its people: Their solidarity is as genuine as their dedication to the arts...
...For generations the Belt has been a preferred holiday spot of New York City's proletariat, overwhelmingly Jewish, forever creating and assimilating new styles of speech, manners, clothes, and schmaltz...
...The second generation remained equally devoted: They were hard-working, essentially extroverted romantics painting outdoors in the French Impressionist tradition, the older artists given to moonlit landscapes, the younger to revolutionary European movements-Especially after the shock of the 1913 Armory Show...
...contributor, "Harper's," "Atlantic" Few places have had a greater impact on American lifestyles than the Woodstock area of the Catskill Mountains, a favorite haunt of thousands of artists for over half a century...
...and thev are always willing to make real sacrifices to help one another...
...Evers gives us a vivid picture of the mountain resort houses, their creators, clientele and varying fortunes over the years...
...After weeks of hiking, he headed down Overlook Mountain and broke through the pass where Mead's Mountain House stood (and still stands today...
...And these mountains will always be inextricably identified with the nation's earliest literary legend, Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle...
...One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud...
...A partial answer is provided by Edmund Wilson in The Shores of Light: "To the writers and artists of my generation who had grown up in the big business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding out of everything they cared about, these years were not depressing but stimulating...
...But vivid memories of them lingered on, and starting in the '40s, a number of folk music artists were attracted to the Woodstock scene: Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter-Paul-and-Mary, and Bob Dylan (who settled first in Byrdcliffe), to name only a few...
...It was a triumph, as were its successors, held regularly until the '30s, when the festivals became so large and boistrous that they were considered unmanagable and thus were discontinued...
...Founded as a mill hamlet a century and a half earlier, visited by the painter Thomas Cole in 1846, it was then a Dutch farming village...
...Equally authentic is their sense of amour-propre-The quality, I would venture, that motivated Evers, a Woodstock resident, to write his splendid and definitive study...
...A listing of Woodstock painters up through the 1930s was virtually a Who's Who of American art, while the concentration of writers, musicians and theatrical artists was almost as impressive...
...There he constructed Byrd-cliffe, named after his Philadelphia-born wife, Jane Byrd McCall...
...In 1906 the summer school of the prestigious Art Students League moved to Woodstock village, boarding its students in local barns...
...Though Woodstock dominates Alf Evers' truly monumental study, eight years in the writing, also included is an engrossing account of the Catskills' Borscht Belt, whence has come the epitome of America's urban humor...
...George's Guild, he planned to finance the colony by "a tax of 10 per cent on the incomes of the richer members...
...The buildings, most of which still stand, are wood, functional, and clean in design, reflecting elements of Swiss and California architecture...
...Brown's enthusiasm was matched by that of White and subsequently Whitehead, who after visiting the area bought seven adjoining farms comprising 1,300 acres along the loveliest foothills of Overlook Mountain...
...Ever since its birth in 1902, Woodstock has been a symbol of the good life-not, mind you, a cornucopia of material goodies like say, Greenwich or Bar Harbor or Lake Forest or even art-cum-wealth East Hampton, but a spiritually rich community aggressively free of the corrupting proprieties associated with the corporate rat race...
...It was a similar revulsion against industrialization that led a millionaire English Socialist named Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead to migrate to America to realize his vision of a community of kindred creative souls...
...In the 1880s he drew up his scheme for the ideal community, emphasizing the arts and crafts...
...borrowing a leaf from John Ruskin's idealized St...
...The community was astonishingly successful from the start, and to this day one can encounter artists of that period who are positively radiant as they savor their memories of Woodstock's early years...
...In truth, as Evers' Catskills makes clear, Woodstock was the inspiration, and it was entirely appropriate that the best of the counterculture would take on the colony's name...
...Why did Woodstock's zenith come during the Prohibition of the late '20s and the Great Depression of the '30s, of all times...
...The received opinion is that the 1969 festival and the emergence of the Woodstock Nation were adventitious events unrelated to the Woodstock community...
...Three full-scale summer theaters were active even during the Depression, and there were constant concerts and recitals, too...
...This network of studios, workshops, forges, theater, library, etc., was the true beginning of the art colony of Woodstock...
...and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating...
...Bom in 1854 in Saddleworth, Yorkshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, he had inherited his family's textile-mill fortune...
...The most famous example of this, the collosal 1969 rock concert attended by 300,000 young people that gave rise to the "Woodstock Nation," actually followed a long tradition of music festivals at the country's oldest and largest artists' colony...
...Then rock succeeded folk, and the rest is history...
Vol. 56 • June 1973 • No. 13
