Gumbo -- Shopping on Canal -- Krauss Department Store -- Treme, Storyville and Creoles -- Heymann at the helm -- Krauss at war -- Expansion and boom -- Fabrics, foundations and food -- Canal Street versus shopping malls -- The end of an era.

It was a decade of flappers, Prohibition, and unprecedented prosperity that abruptly ended with the crash of '29. In New Orleans, steamships lined the wharves, vaudeville gave way to "talkies," and William Faulkner's Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles was the first book produced by a new publisher called Pelican Publishing Company. Mary Lou Widmer's fourth retrospect of the city reminisces about how New Orleans welcomed the economic growth of the postwar twenties in its own special way. The Crescent City celebrated this prosperity, giving birth to jazz halls in the Vieux Carrand launching the careers of musicians like Louis Armstrong. It was the most progressive era in the city's history since before the Civil War. From politics to homelife there is hardly an aspect of life in the twenties Widmer does not touch upon. A full chapter is devoted to how the city known for Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras reacted to Prohibition. Indoor plumbing and electric lights became the standard in homes throughout the city. Transportation opened up new neighborhoods as cars became status symbols and the streetcar system took riders to every neighborhood in the city. Mary Lou Widmer, a native of New Orleans, is former president of the South Louisiana Chapter of Romance Writers of America. She has written several novels set in New Orleans. A certified descendant of settlers in the area prior to the Louisiana Purchase, she is a member of the Louisiana Colonials and the Daughters of 1812. She is also the author of New Orleans in the Thirties, New Orleans in the Forties, and New Orleans in the Fifties, all published by Pelican.

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.