The avant-garde scene’s key figures all lived precariously in the Village

Evidence

That same month, Maya Deren, the filmmaker who for nearly twenty years had personified American avant-garde cinema, died age forty-four of a cerebral hemorrhage. Her death was a shock. “No one had known she was even in hospital, was ill, was anything but what she always was,” Jerry Tallmer wrote in the Voice. No less than her rival in exoticism, the diarist Anais Nin, or the poet e. e. cummings (then being evicted from his Patchen Place apartment), or Willem de Kooning (currently facing charges for a Cedar Tavern brawl), Deren was a heroic Villager and more. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Material precarity of artists as condition for avant-garde density connects to the book’s overall thesis about cheap rent and marginal living enabling invention.