Frank O'Hara's New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism

Abstract Perfectly Disgraceful reads the poetry of Frank O’Hara in the light of the cultural blossoming O’Hara catalysed, the mid-century experimental and multidisciplinary arts scene known as the New York School. The monograph integrates analysis of mid-century modernists and avant-gardes with figures from popular culture. Fresh accounts of canonical figures (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire) and original work on those too little discussed (Edwin Denby, Elaine de Kooning) resound with analysis of queer iconology from Michelangelo’s David to James Dean. Turning away from interpretations of O’Hara’s Transcendentalism, Romanticism, or pastoralism, ‘mid-century Mannerism’ helps explain O’Hara’s self-conscious style, its play with sweet and grand grace, contortion of conventional measure, risks with affectation, conceits, nonchalance, and scrambling of high/low culture. Mannerism also clarifies the sociability implicit in the formal innovations of the New York School. Perfectly Disgraceful advances the study of the kinship between art mediums by retooling rhetoric and recovering a perennial manneristic tendency beyond period style. Genealogies of grace, the figura serpentinata, sprezzatura, ornatus, and the marvellous exemplify qualities exhibited by O’Hara’s New York School. O’Hara’s reception has been tied to painting, predominantly Abstract Expressionism. He was, however, a balletomane, a fan, for whom ballet was ‘made up exclusively of qualities which other arts only aspire to in order to be truly modern’. Relaying ballet’s mannerist origins and aesthetics, and demonstrating its influence alongside Broadway and Hollywood musical-dance on art and poetry, completes this portrait of mid-century modernity.