Almost everyone who encountered Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher Georges Ivan Gurdjieff (ca. 1866-1877 – 1949) in 1920s New York agreed he was enigmatic, strong, and charismatic. Perhaps, also, brash and mercurial. Beyond that, his merits (or faults) lay in the eyes of beholders.
A reporter for Time magazine in 1930 illustrated this, in the way he described Gurdjieff to readers. Gurdjieff, then in his 50s, had recently met with students in a popular Manhattan salon owned by the writer and social activist Muriel Draper.
Gurdjieff, wrote the reporter, “has a domed, shaven head, piercing dark eyes in an oval face, a walrus mustache, bull neck, a paunch, huge muscles. He is unaccountable, unpredictable. A clever man, he acts sometimes like a lunatic, sometimes like a genius, sometimes like a child. He loves to laugh, apparently enjoys being angry.”
What was he up to? Were all his effects and changes intentional?
The solution was: Encountering Gurdjieff, it was up to you to assess if his antics were merely aggressive or strange, or whether, in fact, they were Zen-master-like “shocks” to awaken you from living and acting by rote.
Many people weren’t sure, or changed their views over time. Alfred Orage (1873-1934), an accomplished editor from England, related a useful, pertinent anecdote.
Orage was then in New York, sent there in 1923 to present Gurdjieff’s ideas to America; and one of Orage’s students there, Charles Stanley Nott (1887-1978), recorded an account.
A man approached Gurdjieff with a $100 check for what he called Gurdjieff’s “‘great work’… implying by his manner that he was conferring a favor. Gurdjieff thanked him profusely and invited him to dinner the next day at a restaurant. There were ten… at the meal.”
At meal’s end, Gurdjieff drew attention to the bill, disputing some detail in it with the waiter; then he “paid it, gave the waiter a good tip and placed the bill on the table so that the [$100-donor] could see it…. It came to just one hundred dollars.”
If the man was a Gurdjieff student, training in self-development, the master had just zapped him for caring whether his big donation’s importance was suitably appreciated.
But if the fellow didn’t understand that lesson, after he’d generously responded to frequent appeals for money from Gurdjieff’s organization (in 2025-equivalent dollars, he gave nearly $1,900!) he might feel insulted.
Or, like some, consider Gurdjieff a charlatan. Or, become like Dr. James Corruthers Young, who left a practice in Jungian psychotherapy to move to Gurdjieff’s institute in France; he valued his learning experiences over some years, but finally found the methods oppressive and left.
In any case, when Gurdjieff first came to Manhattan with 25 students (some say 40) in 1924, they put on some amazing shows. It caught the attention of many creative professionals and others, who felt open to spiritual ideas and practices collected and brought from the East.
Gurdjieff’s New York Demonstrations and Teachings
Many years before visiting to America, Gurdjieff traveled widely with a group of “Seekers of the Truth” to “remote places in Russia, Persia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Himalayas.”
A person who reviewed Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men recounted that Gurdjieff sought out knowledge and the “supernatural among dervishes, monks in virtually inaccessible monasteries, soothsayers, and many varieties of Oriental and Western Mystics.”
Gurdjieff’s detailed recollection and synthesis of what he experienced in the East was as remarkable as the people he met. He later attracted, in Russia, by 1913, some very distinguished people as students (writers, musicians, doctors, etc.); and his group moved several times in the coming years to avoid wars and revolutions.
At last, in Fontainebleau, France, 1922, he found political stability and financial support to inaugurate his dream: the
Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.
One of Gurdjieff’s central teachings was “Remember yourself always and everywhere.” That is, be self-aware of what you are doing and thinking, and of the habits, emotions, and influences that usually drag you around unawares.
In that light, spending long, hard days of labor at his institute, likely including frictions with other students, were all opportunities for his students to practice self-remembering.
He might have you dig a hole all day; and that night, assign another pupil fill it all back in.
Equally central to Gurdjieff’s teaching were dances and music that he adapted from what he’d seen and heard in the East.
It took tremendous concentration to perform these “sacred movements.” And they had, intentionally, strong emotional effects on those who performed them or observed them.
Rheta Childe Dorr witnessed these dances, first hand, in France, a few months before they were brought to New York. Dorr had previously been an investigative reporter for the New York Evening Post, and then editor of The Suffragist magazine. She described the dances in an article she published in U.S. papers:
“A group of men and women drifted to the platform and began dancing to this haunting, tormenting, mysterious music. The women wore simple evening gowns, white or softly tinted, rather loosely draped, yet modish in line. Some of the men were in dinner jackets, some in ordinary day suits… Most of the dancers wore soft, heelless slippers.”
This was not an ordinary ballet. “There was no direction, but the dances must have been endlessly rehearsed. The dancers, as it were, fell into the music, followed it bar after bar, phrase after phrase, as if hypnotized by it.
“They seemed to be projected images of the music [and moved to it] as if in a trance or dream. Nobody made the same movements as the others, yet every one moved in obedience to the music.”
This “continued almost without a break until 5 o’clock in the morning.”
The first demonstration on Gurdjieff’s first tour occurred before his group even disembarked in New York, on January 13. There was a concert en route, on board the 36,000-ton ocean liner Paris, which carried the group.
Notable fellow passengers who likely saw the show included: Bunau Varilla, a promoter for building the Panama Canal; Lady Violet, the Countess of Donegal; and Egyptologist Azeez Khayet.
In the weeks that followed, Gurdjieff events were called “demonstrations” rather than “concerts.”
The implication was: People have more potential (in fact, an amazing potential) to develop their faculties more fully and “harmoniously” than they usually do.
Like Gurdjieff’s students (who were mostly not professional dancers) audience members could hope to, possibly, with much effort, accomplish similar movements and other surprising feats of memory and concentration as were demonstrated.
Alfred Orage was tasked to make the arrangements, whenever Gurdjieff was touring. At other times, Orage led discussions of his own on the teachings. He had knowledge of them from living in Gurdjieff’s Institute in France, himself, before Gurdjieff sent him to New York in 1923.
Before he moved to France, Orage had owned and edited, since 1906, the respected London weekly, the New Age. Its pages introduced promising new writers, and also featured well-known authors like Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and G.K. Chesterton, discussing literary, political and economic questions.
On discussions of philosophy and the occult, T.S. Elliot wrote that Orage was the “finest critical intelligence of his generation.”
Orage always aimed, in his own talks and writings, to interpret Gurdjieff’s teachings faithfully. And until 1931, no one, including Gurdjieff, disputed his success on this.
Then, according to American psychologist Charles Daly King, Gurdjieff “suddenly and without warning… repudiated Mr. Orage” and Orage’s version of the teachings.
Reasons for this are debated; but some students felt it was not Orage who had changed course. In any case, Orage returned to England, concluding that phase of the New York activities.
Noteworthy People and Places
Charles Nott, mentioned earlier, witnessed Gurdjieff’s first public demonstration in New York. He described it in considerable detail, in his book Teachings of Gurdjieff: The Journal of a Pupil.
The event was free, he said, and the hall “was filled with what are called ‘interesting’ people, that is, those who read, wrote, painted, or composed, or just talked about such things.”
Judging by accounts, books, and articles written by others who witnessed Gurdjieff-related events in those years, it seems everyone was impressed with the “interesting people” in attendance.
The following account is typical. This one is by Gorham Munson, a long-time student of Orage’s classes about Gurdjieff’s teachings:
Orage was talking to a group, and the “place is a large room above a garage on East Fortieth Street. It is Muriel Draper’s flat and there is … a gilt throne from a production of Hamlet which Mrs. Draper had picked up…. About 70 people had gathered…
“Seated well back is Herbert Croly, the founder and editor of the New Republic…. A few rows in front is Karl Zigrosser, the print expert. Well off to one side is Amos Pinchot, the liberal publicist, and just coming in we see John O’Hara Cosgrave, the Sunday editor of the New York World.
“Near the front sits Helen Westley of the Theatre Guild, and always on the front row is historical novelist Mary Johnston…
“On the floor up front with an Indian blanket around his shoulders is impassive Tony, [the Pueblo Native American] husband of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and near him…is the celebrated memoirist herself.”
The list continues with a Dr Louis Berman, “authority on glands” and the painter Boardman Robinson.
Helping to facilitate those early events was a natural magnet, on 44th Street near Grand Central Station, for people likely to be interested in G.I. Gurdjieff: The Sunwise Turn bookshop.
Co-founder of that shop, Mrs. Mary Mowbray-Clarke, once recalled to Arietta Watts of the Brooklyn Eagle that she envisioned a “bookshop that should be sort of a university… where one can quietly look through books, meet book people, discuss questions, and incidentally purchase the book you really want.”
Books should be available in all “the various departments of human thought.” The name Sunwise Turn, she said, is “linked with many old myths”, and from the Gaelic, it means “going with the forces of nature.”
Orage, himself, happened upon that venue. Source documents obtained by Justin Duerr, an historian of that bookstore, reveal that Orage gave his first public lecture on Gurdjieff’s teachings there, on January 9, 1924. About 85 people attended.
Charles Daly King was attracted to the bookstore, as well, though he was not at the January event. He was then co-running his late father’s New York financial-services business; but his heart was not in it. He dreamed of working in the new field of psychoanalysis. So, he read everything he could find on mind and psychology; and bought all his books at the Sunwise Turn bookshop.
There he met Jessie Dwight, who recently became a limited partner in the store. Orphaned at age nine, she was raised in the care of her grandmother, and became, in the words of historian Elisa Rolle, a “well-to-do young woman in Albany society,” eventually getting funds for the partnership in the Sunwise Turn in 1923.
Dwight likely worked with Orage to arrange his January lecture and attended the event; and they doubtless spent more time together. (She and Orage eventually married, in 1927.)
So, when Dwight learned of customer Charles King’s interests, she repeatedly suggested to him that he, too, meet Orage, and attend one of his upcoming talks and discussion groups, in the city.
At first, Charles resisted. He said he wanted no part of “quacks-on-the-make” or “groups of fanatics meeting privately to discuss strange notions.” But Jessie convinced him that Orage was not that type of person.
Charles finally attended an Orage talk. “I think what impressed me most at this first meeting was the complete and utter rationality of what I heard…,” King wrote.
“It was demanded that I adopt skepticism toward what I heard, i.e., that I should neither believe nor disbelieve, that for the moment I should not even judge.” That gave him confidence to stay involved.
Another seeker who, propitiously, found himself at the Sunwise Turn in 1923 was that same Charles Nott who became Orage’s — as well as Gurdjieff’s — student.
Nott was born in England, and served in the Great War; but he came out injured and with shell-shock. He traveled the world and observed different religions, and immersed himself in books; but he still felt empty.
He set sail for New York, and was grateful to be hired at the Sunwise Turn, where he met “artists, poets, and musicians” … and Orage. He attended Orage’s first talk.
Not long after, Gurdjieff’s first demonstration was held, near 83rd street and Broadway. The building, variously called “Leslie Hall,” “Leslie Rooms” or “Leslie’s Rooms,” was built in 1896, and associated with George Wallace’s Dance School from its beginning.
Curiously, Gurdjieff himself never held a scheduled event at the Sunwise Turn — yet he did once hold an unscheduled event there. Gurdjieff, according to the records Duerr obtained, held a lecture “and possibly a ‘movement class’” there on March 2, 1924.
The event was supposed to be held at Rosetta O’Neill’s dance studio, at 746 Madison Avenue. In those days, O’Neill was, as described by dance historian Paul Magriel, the “dean of New York’s teachers of the social dance.”
Her studio was in a four-storey building, encased in the retained, outer shell of a previous building: an 1885 synagogue built in a Byzantine-Moorish style.
For some reason, however, O’Neill could not be found at the studio on the appointed day, and no one could find the studio’s key. Thanks to their connections with the bookshop, organizers quickly moved the event to the Sunwise Turn. About 40 people showed up.
The very next night, starting 8:30 pm on March 3, 1924, a complete Gurdjieff Institute Demonstration was held in the Main Hall of the renowned Carnegie Hall. Besides being astounded by the demonstration, itself, a society columnist was quite amused at what happened when the curtains first parted for the exhibition:
“A most curious chattering arose from the galleries where hundreds of artists and students, having deprived themselves of a meal in order to buy the cheapest seats, decided suddenly to abolish class distinctions…
“Like a hillside covered with magpies and chipmunks, they arose with one impulse, fluttered and scrambled to the stairs, and a few moments later, snickering and elated, they filled [any] empty hundred-dollar boxes and five-fifty seats, causing many an inmate of an ermine coat to shudder inwardly.”
Some “ardent disciples of the group” began to meet nightly, afterwards, at O’Neill’s Madison Avenue studio, perhaps to learn more. (Evidently, they’d found the key to the studio, missing a few days earlier.)
Two other venues for Gurdjieff’s demonstrations had tie-ins to dancing, in quite different ways. The first was the Neighborhood Playhouse Theater, then at 466 Grand Street.
That’s where Martha Graham (1894-1991), “Dancer of the Century” according to Time magazine, danced and choreographed performances. She created at least 180 ballets.
The other venue was Church-of St. Marks’-in-the-Bowery. Gurdjieff’s demonstrations there fit right into an unconventional time in that church’s history.
The present building, located on the Lower East Side, was consecrated in 1799. Alexander Hamilton helped to incorporate it as an Episcopal parish, according to the church’s website. It had numerous prominent congregants in the 1800s, including a New York State governor and an attorney general.
However, the church fell on hard times in the 1900s. When William Guthrie took over as reverend in 1911, writes Phil Jenkins in The Chrisian Century, the “congregation consisted of just 18 older women.”
So, Guthrie reached out, first, to “avant-garde artists and thinkers” in nearby Greenwich Village. He also devoted himself (before church authorities were ready for this), to “interfaith outreach, on a grand scale.”
Services or rituals led by Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, and others, were not uncommon there. He especially believed in the power of dance in worship; so, Gurdjieff demonstrations were an obvious fit.
Besides formal classes or other events, a lucky few people could sometimes run into, or be invited to join with Orage or Gurdjieff (when in town), for discussions in a café or restaurant.
One such locale was Christ Cella’s on East 45th Street — a “speakeasy” during Prohibition. Carl Zigrosser recalled the “easy family atmosphere” in the back room beyond the kitchen.
(Nelson Robins, then a crime reporter for the Brooklyn Times Union, estimated there were many thousands of speakeasies in New York City. By “just hearsay,” mind you, he’d heard there was not much risk, provided a grateful patrolman or two was given occasional refreshment after a long day at work.)
Another favorite location to meet and talk with coffee was Child’s restaurant. Child’s was popular chain of that era.
A Continuing Legacy
To this day, New Yorkers curious about Gurdjieff’s teachings can find supports and resources through websites like The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York.
More general resources are also available, such as books and websites like gurdjieff.org.
One organization stands out, however, for having a direct link to the specific times highlighted in this article: The Rochester Folk Art Guild.
This community, residing on a 350-acre farm in New York’s Finger Lakes region, was founded by Louise March. Louise March, née Goepfert, was, in 1929, an art historian and art-faculty member at Hunter College.
When Gurdjieff returned to the city early that year, she attended a recital of his music (co-composed with his student, Thomas de Hartmann) at Carnegie Hall. Gurdjieff stayed in New York for a few weeks, as usual meeting with students.
This time, March participated; and then followed Gurdjieff to live and study at his institute in France. By 1957, years after Gurdjieff’s passing, March met with and helped to guide others near Rochester, New York, who were interested in Gurdjieff’s ideas.
She realized, she once wrote, “that one cannot only talk philosophy…that one needs the whole man, so we started with…crafts.”
In the Guild that evolved, participants learn and work together — with as much self remembering and conscious engagement as possible — on a variety of crafts. Their products are often sold in at shows in town.
Imagining 1920s life at the Fontainebleau Institute or in a Ritz-Carlton dining room, however, with the larger-than-life personality of a Gurdjieff surveying you intensely, may make today’s Gurdjieff discussion groups or Folk Art Guild meditations seem more laid back. Who could fill those shoes?
Nevertheless, these efforts keep the teachings alive for new generations to assess for themselves.
Illustrations, from above: George Gurdjieff (Library of Congress); images from 1924 reporting of Gurdjieff introducing his dance methods to America; a satirical picture-cartoon about Gurdjieff published in the Rome Sentinel, Apr. 25, 1925; Alfred Richard Orage; the two founders of the Sunwise Turn Bookshop at its original location; Sunwise Turn Bookshop in the Yale Club building in the 1920s; a ticket for an event at Leslie Hall in 1919; Neighborhood Playhouse Theater at its 466 Grand Street Address, 1916 (Library of Congress); and church dancing at Rev. William Guthrie’s St. Marks-Church-on-the-Bowery (The Herald Statesman, Mar. 27, 1924).
