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Café Life, Performances and Fancy-dress Balls

In 1913, when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performs in the theatres of the Right Bank, the artists of the more bohemian Left Bank are, as yet, conspicuous by their absence. The district of Montparnasse seems to be under construction. Picasso is already celebrated as a cubist; Modigliani is carving stone heads; Apollinaire praises Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; and de Chirico’s work looks (to the jury of the Salon des Indépendants) like backdrops in a theatre.

From her box in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Gertrude Stein glanced down and noticed Apollinaire moving around the auditorium – the first time she had seen any artist from Montparnasse in evening dress. She watched as he slid between the seats, shaking hands as he went with the fashionable women of the Right Bank. It was 29 May 1913, the opening night of the Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Paris adored the Ballets Russes. The gratin of Paris had gathered for the premiere. The curtain rose; the performance was about to start. What happened next has gone down in history. With the primitive-sounding opening notes, like wild cries, the first glimpse of the dancers in their rough, peasant costumes jumping with their feet turned inwards, the hissing began. This, surely, was not ballet but a display of unrestrained and uncensored primitive emotion. The costumes were coarse, the dancers’ moves were ugly, the music was unmistakably lewd. It immediately dawned on some that whatever the joke was supposed to be, it was clearly – insultingly – on them. In her box, old Comtesse de Pourtalès rose to her feet, coronet askew, brandishing her fan, protesting, ‘This is the first time in sixty years anyone has dared insult me!’ Supporters of Diaghilev hastily applauded, loudly, hoping to drown out the jeers. As Gertrude Stein recalled, ‘We could hear nothing … one literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music.’ The man in the box next to hers brought down his cane on an obvious enthusiast in the box to the other side of him. Marcel Duchamp was also in the tumultuous auditorium; he later remarked that the performance of the audience had made more of an impression on him than that of the dancers. Mayhem ensued. The dancers danced on.

The audience (carefully cultivated by Diaghilev) consisted almost exclusively of inhabitants of the Right Bank, all fabulously wealthy members of high-ranking society, a milieu strikingly different from the more bohemian and even the bourgeois milieu on the other side of the river. In terms of the inflexible, deeply rooted hierarchy of France’s Third Republic, the real thing was here on the Right Bank – the wealthy, cultured vicomtes and vicomtesses, princesses and countesses, the aristocrats and grande bourgeoisie who patronized the arts and on whose support Diaghilev depended if he wished to bring the avant-garde to the world of Parisian theatre. As for the social make-up of the corps de ballet, that was a different matter. The dancers were mainly classless Russian immigrants, among them the privately decadent, socially outrageous, temperamentally volatile and daringly (in those days, illegally) gay – an intoxicating mix to some followers, including twenty-four-year-old Jean Cocteau, who remarked on the conspicuous absence of any artist from Montparnasse. The involvement of Picasso and others with the Ballets Russes came a few years later, and only with the intervention of Cocteau. In 1913 the district’s young painters showed no interest in the ballet, while the more senior ones still thought of it as the exclusive reserve of the beau monde. ‘Montparnasse knew nothing of Le Sacre du printemps …’

Cocteau later claimed he had never been to Montparnasse until he met Picasso there in 1916, but he must have had some familiarity with the district. Our introduction to Montparnasse comes to us instead through the eyes of Beatrice Hastings, a young writer who arrived in the district in May 1914 who soon became Modigliani’s lover and, under the pen-name Alice Morning, reported her ‘Impressions of Paris’ for London’s literary magazine the New Age. In Montparnasse she discovered café life, artists and fancy-dress balls. ‘Much laughter, much applause for your frock if it is chic, three hundred people inside and outside the Rotonde, very much alive!’ Everything seemed ‘quick and fireworky, impressionist’. With its preponderance of cafés, dance halls, small studios and newly built cités des artistes (blocks of purpose-built studios) the district was conducive to the bohemian way of life. In the new galleries still opening up, exhibitions of works by individual artists (a relatively recent strategy, initiated in the small galleries of Montmartre) had proved successful in pushing up prices; and for aspiring artists there were prospects of commercial success and opportunities to exhibit work that tested the boundaries of artistic experimentation. During the previous few years cubism had exploded upon the scene, filling the small galleries with avant-garde work (and heaving aside those artists – including Picasso’s old friends from his Montmartre days, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck – for whom cubism held no appeal).

The wide boulevard du Montparnasse was flanked by a muddle of small streets where grass grew between the cobbles. In those days the district felt borderless, containing a mixture of architecture, and the geography of the area (then, as now) could be confusing; not long after arriving Beatrice discovered that ‘the street I used to take two trams to get to is round the corner’. There was no obvious demarcation, since the quartier spanned both the 6th and 14th arrondissements and bordered on the district of St-Germain-des-Prés. It had long ago acquired the nickname Mount Parnassus from the students at the universities there. With the overlapping arrondissements came an eclectic social mix; writers, journalists, students, politicians, nuns and cab drivers could all be seen on the streets of Montparnasse, mingling with the bourgeois owners of the larger properties still under construction throughout the district. New buildings were going up everywhere, the noise of the works competing with the rattle of the trams. The Rotonde had been refurbished in 1911, its terrace reduced following the instalment of the Métro line (begun in 1905, and continuing well into the 1920s), though the café had gained a smart new façade and an extended interior room. The locals kept to the old back room, where the models went, too, in the afternoons, the artists favouring the large new room at the front, where Modigliani could usually be found in heated debate and Picasso stood ‘like a seigneur waiting for a train’, keeping his distance from all the latest artistic disputes.

Beatrice’s Baedeker guide recommended the Musée du Luxembourg and promised glimpses of artists’ studios beneath ‘trees that have leaves like fingers spread out’ but, so far, she had seen neither. She had, however (within days of her arrival), met Modigliani, ‘the bad garçon of a sculptor’, in one of the small restaurants. When they met again in the Rotonde he invited her to the cinema. She doesn’t say what they saw – the latest episode of Les Mystères de New York (The Exploits of Elaine), perhaps, with Pearl White, American darling of the silver screen, or the popular thriller Les Vampires, starring Musidora, with her seductively wild, black, undone hair. Or perhaps Fantômas, based on a popular crime series, whose hero, the ‘genius of evil’, rampaged across Paris robbing, torturing and killing his victims before escaping in scenes of daring. Whatever they saw, it would have been silent – talkies came to the Parisian screens only in the 1930s. Modigliani said he adored the cinema – before falling asleep on Beatrice’s shoulder. ‘ “You mustn’t go to sleep on my shoulder!” I objected – “all the world knows you.” “Not a soul,” he said, and waved anew to somebody else. “You mustn’t fall in love with me,” he said. “It’s no use – yes, do! – no, don’t – it’s no use.” ’ Then they went for a walk around Montparnasse, through the Luxembourg Gardens, to where Gertrude Stein lived, in the rue de Fleurus, and held soirées for painters and writers. ‘Ah!’ said Modigliani. ‘That is where la belle Américaine lives with her brother.’ Beatrice asked to be taken to meet them. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She’s as ugly as Fate. I have a horror of her.’ (Since, over the previous few years, Gertrude Stein had purchased the work of virtually every talented contemporary artist except Modigliani, the feeling may well have been mutual.)

At no. 216, boulevard Raspail, not far from where Picasso lived, in a large, modern apartment building at no. 242, Modigliani seemed to have taken up residence in a glass box, or perhaps a small, disused greenhouse, in a tiny courtyard reached by a short passageway. Its floor was littered with drawings, paintings and one or two sculpted heads roughly hewn of stone – dramatic, boulder-like, emerging from the rock like primitive figures. But Modigliani never stayed anywhere for long. He roamed Montparnasse, borrowing or sharing other people’s studios or sleeping on their floors, cutting a distinctive figure in his battered black corduroy suit, or the brown one he wore with a brownish-yellow cap, to look like Picasso. When not sculpting or painting he read the philosophers Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, or the cult novel of the moment, Les Chants de Maldoror, by the ‘Comte de Lautréamont’ (aka Isidore-Lucien Ducasse; he wrote it in 1868, and died two years later, at the age of twenty-four). Modigliani was a great exponent of Maldoror (it was also later championed by the surrealist artists), a fantasy of apocalyptic licentiousness, dark and dreamlike as a painting by Gustave Moreau, though more overtly pornographic. A naked woman and a glow worm appear at Maldoror’s feet. ‘This woman’s name is Prostitution,’ warns the glow worm (voice of morality and reason), whereupon Maldoror crushes it with a rock. ‘The wind groans in its languorous tones through the leaves, and the owl intones its deep lament … Then dogs, driven wild, snap their chains …’ Before the surrealists came to dominate the art world of Montparnasse, this was the closest art got to tapping the outlawed drives of the unconscious.

With Modigliani, Beatrice explored the art scene. He took her to one exhibition, a gathering consisting of starving artists, a few successful painters and the bourgeoisie of Montparnasse (unlike the Right Bank crowd, these were not, it seems, wealthy patrons of the arts so much as snobbish hangers-on, on the alert for any artist who seemed about to ‘arrive’), at which paintings by Picasso and Henri Rousseau were displayed above a table on which stood one of Modigliani’s powerful stone heads. Everyone gathered round to admire Picasso’s work – ‘Superbe!’ ‘Magnifique!’ ‘Oui! Très joli!’ Nobody (except Beatrice) seemed to be paying any attention to Modigliani’s. Not that he seemed to mind; he was always happy to give away a work for a few francs, as long as the purchaser stood him a drink or two.

In the art magazines, it seemed that virtually every exhibition of contemporary art was reviewed by Apollinaire. Rushing from exhibition to exhibition, soirée to soirée, he was a familiar figure in the streets of Montparnasse, always laden with rare or second-hand books (he was an enthusiastic bibliophile). When he did stop for a conversation he was an expressive listener, widening his eyes and crossing and uncrossing his arms as if to punctuate the dialogue. He seemed to know everyone, noticing every promising newcomer and making a point of mentioning young artists in the art press; he relished any kind of experimentation. He had been among the first admirers of Picasso’s work, heaping praise on his early paintings of harlequins and clowns, beneath whose ‘tawdry finery’ he detected ‘the presence of real … people – versatile, shrewd, clever, poor, and deceitful’. Before anyone had even thought of surrealism, Apollinaire had been looking for the next thing that would shake up the art world. In 1911 he still favoured the work of painters such as his friend Robert Delaunay – great, jagged forms painted in greens and yellows like vivid bursts of sunlight – until he and Delaunay fell out when Apollinaire referred to him as a fauvist. Other exciting young artists, though, were emerging.

Apollinaire had been keeping an eye on the young Marcel Duchamp (aged twenty-six in 1913) since being struck by the artist’s work at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants. In Apollinaire’s view the geometrical elements of Duchamp’s painting broadly aligned him with cubism but seemed to suggest something more – there were aspects which Apollinaire could describe only as ‘elements of real being’ (‘ces traces d’êtres’).

In spring 1913 Duchamp was still living in his family home in Puteaux, a district just beyond the Bois de Boulogne, with his brother and half-brother (painter Jacques Villon and sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon). All three artists were concerned with the geometrical element described by mathematicians as the ‘golden section’ (the Euclidean ‘fourth dimension’), which introduced the element of velocity into a three-dimensional structure and thus elements of movement into two- and three-dimensional works of art. The three brothers were passionately committed to exploring the mathematical elements of pictorial art. Exhibiting together, they called themselves the Section d’Or, or Golden Section Group, the name they had used when they exhibited together in October 1912 at Galerie la Boétie, where Duchamp had shown Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2. (They were familiarly known as the Groupe Puteaux.)

Apollinaire was not the only one who found this particular painting arresting. Among others taking note of all three Duchamp brothers’ work was the American Walter Pach, who had been in Paris since 1907. In late 1912 he and two associates had been exploring Paris for examples of French modern art to exhibit at the Armory show that was to take place in February 1913 and which was intended to be New York’s most significant showcase of contemporary work to date. Pach introduced his visitors to all the artists he knew in Paris and took them to meet the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux, probably on the recommendation of Picasso, whose scribbled list of recommended artists, most of them cubist, including Duchamp (Picasso spelled it ‘Duchan’), appears in the archives of the Armory show. Pach was so impressed by Nude … No. 2 that he had the canvas shipped to New York for the exhibition. Nevertheless, by October 1912 Marcel Duchamp was already deeply disillusioned with the art world. In exhibiting with his brothers, he was making an exception – following his recent experience with the Salon des Indépendants he had ‘lost interest in groups’. From now on he would resolutely keep his distance from the Parisian art scene.

Apollinaire moved from the suburbs to Paris in January 1913 to an apartment at no. 202, boulevard Saint-Germain. It was ideally located for café life, only about a hundred yards from Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, two other places popular with the artists of the Left Bank. He filled his new home with treasured possessions – rare books, ethnic carvings, wooden theatrical puppets and paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Marie Laurencin (his first love) and other contemporary artists – and began holding weekly soirées for friends. Young painters, poets and scholars could be found draped across the divans, smoking clay pipes or reciting poetry while Apollinaire presided, seated at his work table.

Among his first visitors was twenty-four-year-old Giorgio de Chirico, sent along on the recommendation of Parisian friends familiar with the artistic ‘ambiance’ of Apollinaire’s gatherings. Apollinaire encouraged him to submit four works to the 1913 Salon des Indépendants, where members of the selection committee (including André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Moreau) told the artist his paintings were like stage sets; he would probably make a good set designer. As far as de Chirico was concerned, they had missed the point entirely; in his opinion, his paintings were purely ‘metaphysical’. In one of his most striking works of 1913, The Uncertainty of the Poet, a twisted torso of plaster or marble stands opposite a row of arches which casts a deep shadow on the ground. The bust is strongly lit, as is the steam train racing past the horizon, a cloud of white smoke billowing behind it. On the ground in front of the bust is an outsized bunch of bananas. The jury had clearly ignored the ‘exceedingly solitary and profound lyricism’ of his work, as did others (including, shortly, the surrealists), who persisted in reading into it prophecies of catastrophe or cataclysm, ‘a kind of atmosphere of terror, the air of a thriller or suspense film’, which he had had no intention of creating.

At the Salon des Indépendants both Apollinaire and Picasso admired de Chirico’s work, and one of Picasso’s regular purchasers bought one of his paintings. Picasso asked Apollinaire to introduce him to the artist. Together they tracked him down to his basement studio and introduced him to their friend Paul Guillaume. Guillaume was a former garage worker who had spotted an African artefact amid a delivery of tyres; on the strength of this he had established a reputation as a prospective dealer and was about to open a gallery. After some persuasion Guillaume bought a few paintings and offered to make a contractual agreement with de Chirico which amounted to the monopoly of his work, a new practice among dealers in Paris which de Chirico thought despicable; he dismissed the offer as ‘nefarious’.

That same spring Apollinaire had a book on art and artists published, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations ésthetiques (Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations), a mixture of previously published articles and new pieces on contemporary painters, including Marcel Duchamp. (Apollinaire’s attempt in the preface to distinguish between four types of cubism succeeded only in irritating some artists, who grumbled that he might be a gifted poet but he obviously had no idea how to paint.) In a more persuasive piece for the arts magazine Montjoie! he described Picasso’s attempts to test the boundaries of cubism by bringing ‘real objects to the light … a real postage-stamp, pieces of newspaper …’ in constructions juxtaposed in bas-relief on to canvas or free-standing wood, letting the connections between them speak for themselves. When he saw these new mixed-media collages Apollinaire predicted that the object, ‘real or in trompe-l’œil’, would become increasingly significant in the development of contemporary art, as artists went on finding ways to incorporate everyday things into the fabric of their work. (He might almost have been predicting the appearance of the earliest examples of surrealism.)

In the rue Christine, a small street in the 6th arrondissement not far from the place Saint-Michel, Apollinaire sat in a workmen’s bar enjoying the movement of people and picking up random snatches of conversation: ‘La mère de la concierge et la concierge laisseront tout passer/ … Je partirai à 20h/ … Le chat noir traverse la brasserie’ (‘The concierge’s mother and the concierge will let anything go by/ … I leave at 8 o’clock/ … The black cat crosses the bar’). These overheard fragments were incorporated into a poem he wrote that summer, ‘Lundi rue Christine’ (‘Monday rue Christine’), still one of his best-known, most highly praised works. He had just published his second volume of poetry, Alcools (Alcohol), and with it he made his most significant contribution to the art world of 1913. In a literary climate still dominated by symbolism this work was truly avant-garde, creating a new kind of poetic intervention. Alcools was effectively a poetic collage, comparable with Picasso’s visual collages; the poet is simply – as it were – passing on to the reader fragments of the city’s café culture and street life. In ‘Vendémiaire’ (the first month of the French Revolutionary calendar) the poet is deeply embedded in the life of the city, a mere vessel for words to pass through: ‘Écoutez-moi je suis le gosier de Paris/Et je boirai encore s’il me plaît l’univers’ (‘Listen to me I’m the throat of Paris/And if I want I’ll drink the universe again’).

Apollinaire was ahead of his time; one critic wrote of Alcools that ‘nothing is more reminiscent of a junk shop’. However, the book did attract some enthusiastic young readers. Marcel Duchamp liked it, as did the seventeen-year-old schoolboy André Breton, then still living with his parents in the rue Étienne-Marcel, a district adjoining (in fact, barely distinct from) Montparnasse. On the point of discovering his own youthful desire for rebellion, he was reading the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and for the first time exploring the museums and galleries of Paris, including the Gustave Moreau museum in the rue de La Rochefoucauld, where he was riveted by Moreau’s tantalizing ‘ “evil women” of history and mythology’.