Drippers & Printmakers

The American political tradition derives from Great Britain, and so, some say, does American English. But the modern American arts took more from France. French novelists showed Henry James how to develop the English triple-decker without falling back into existing American styles, whether the disorderly entertainments of Twain or the syncretic weirdness of Melville. French poets showed Pound and Eliot how the light lyric could carry the heaviest of modern content. In cinema, the Lumière brothers supplied Hollywood with its technology. Even in popular music, America’s strongest suit, it was the tonal moods of Ravel and Debussy that allowed Duke Ellington to slip the cords of blues harmony.