The Arts: 100 Years Of Attitude

How modernism became classic and how modernity is racing beyond everyone's grasp

It all happened so fast. One minute Madama Butterfly was on the Gramophone, Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills was on the reading table, the pretty Gibson Girl you had seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams in her return engagement as Peter Pan. Or perhaps brave the odors and chatter of the nickelodeon to catch that spunky new girl--her name, unpublicized at the time, was Mary Pickford--people were talking about in Ramona.

How sweet it was--the genteel culture of this century's first decade. There were noises off, of...

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