Explores the remarkable 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, focusing on the hitherto neglected significance of photography in documenting the opera and its all-African American cast, and examining the roles of fashion, dance, literature, and music in the opera’s popular success.

Foreword by Anna DannemannIntroduction – Patricia Allmer and John Sears1 Moving pictures: photography and time in Four Saints in Three Acts – Patricia Allmer2 Modernism in tableaux: race and desire in Four Saints in Three Acts – Lisa Barg3 Styling Four Saints in Three Acts: scene, costume, fashion and the queer modern moment – Christopher Breward4 Not so black and white: Frederick Ashton’s ‘outsider’ ballet – Lucy Weir5 ‘As if they were the saints they said they were’: Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and serial resemblance – John Sears6 The visitable past: Four Saints in Three Acts remembered – Steven WatsonIndex

This book accompanies and extends the first exhibition surveying the complex but hitherto neglected roles played by photography in the major 1934 avant-garde opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Four Saints was an experimental work gathering together contributions by key members of the American and European musical, literary, and artistic avant-gardes – including Florine Stettheimer, Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Frederick Ashton, and Eva Jessye – that nonetheless achieved remarkable popular success. Photography was a key element of the construction, representation, and dissemination of the opera. Photographs by Lee Miller, Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, the Broadway photographers working for White Studio, and others portrayed the people involved in the opera’s production and recorded key scenes and moments in the performances, as well as documenting evidence of the opera’s impact on New York commercial culture at the time. The photographic recording of the all-African American cast, in particular, affords a unique and historically resonant insight into the complexities of Four Saints in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the New York avant-gardes of the time. This book presents a wide selection of photographs of the cast, performances, and other material – many images reproduced for the first time – with accompanying essays by an international range of scholars exploring different aspects of the opera, including dance, fashion, music, and avant-garde writing, as well as photography.[Photographers' Gallery logo to appear on back cover alongside MUP logo.]