ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the modernist venture required the mediating or border-crossing work of apologists who could bring modernism to a wider public while at the same time assuring that the modernist practitioner could remain visibly committed to 'the absolute' and to 'ultimate values'. It also shows that these apologists were typically women, many of whom were artists in their own right and whose more 'serious' work would suffer critical neglect as a result of its association with 'the popular'. The chapter discusses primarily Djuna Barnes's sketches of Greenwich Village life and articles about James Joyce and Nina Hamnett's autobiography and cafe sketches. Although Nina Hamnett drew and painted her share of heads, when she wrote her self-portrait, Laughing Torso: Reminiscences, she titled it after the tiny, headless, marble Torso by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska for which she was the model.
