2.

What is Art?

Duchamp continues to experiment. Apollinaire leaves for fashionable Deauville to review the summer season (including a lecture on art and neurosis) … and swiftly turns back to Paris as war breaks out.

By the time Le Sacre du printemps was staged in May 1913, Cocteau had known Diaghilev and been designing artwork to publicize the Ballets Russes for three years (they were introduced by a mutual friend). He was living with his mother on the rue d’Anjou, separated from the Grand and Petit Palais (and from the Élysée Palace itself) only by broad avenues of trees, ravishing in pastel-pink blossom in spring, a glorious profusion of yellow and gold in autumn. White horses pulled closed carriages along the quiet cobbled streets; the area was bathed in the unmistakable hush of wealth. His friends included Marcel Proust, Jean Hugo (great-grandson of the illustrious author of Les Misérables) and the fabulously well-off Comte Étienne de Beaumont, who gave parties dressed in spectacular drag; jewellery festooned his dresses and ornamental headgear. Though Cocteau had seen performances by the Ballets Russes before, Le Sacre had astounded him – and Cocteau enjoyed being astounded. As a child he had watched, spellbound, as his mother made her preparations for a night out at the theatre, an enrapturing performance in itself, involving clouds of perfume and mauve-tinted powder; she sometimes wore a long stiff red velvet gown embroidered with jet beads, and long gloves that to the child resembled ‘dead skins’ which ‘came to life’ as she pulled them over each finger.

Cocteau adored the Ballets Russes. One of its attractions was of course Nijinsky (Diaghilev kept a close eye on him when Cocteau was around), but his real intoxication was with the behind-the-scenes world of rehearsal rooms, the dressing rooms, the regular, fascinating tantrums. Cocteau was familiar with Diaghilev’s world. Even so, Le Sacre struck a new note with its revolutionary choreography and staging, the repetition of simple, apparently monotonous gestures, the shocking position of the dancers’ inward-pointing feet. Cocteau was and remained convinced that what had really offended Diaghilev’s wealthy audiences was not, as widely assumed, any perceived attack on prevailing standards of morality but rather the realization that, aesthetically, they were out of their depth. For Cocteau, the Ballets’ radical aestheticism was heady, but it jarred with him that it was still being associated exclusively with the beau monde when there were artists in Montparnasse who would have been more in tune with the experimentalism of the company’s productions.

In September that year Picasso moved from the boulevard Raspail to a vast apartment in an adjoining street at 5 bis, rue Victor-Schœlcher, where his studio overlooked Montparnasse Cemetery. Picasso’s building was one of the new constructions Beatrice Hastings had seen going up and had a carpeted staircase lit by bulbs suspended by nymphs cast in bronze and decorated with plaster replicas of the Elgin Marbles. In somewhat stark contrast, his studio was a chaos of canvases and constructions – his recent work included assemblages and montages of guitar shapes mounted on wood, as well as paper collages embellished with sheet music, visiting cards and wallpaper integrated with various objects – cigarette packets, pipes, dice; in one, an entire journal. In his paintings he mixed pigment with plaster, grit, sand and coffee grounds – the ‘real objects’ presciently noted by Apollinaire.

In October Marcel Duchamp also arrived in Montparnasse, moving from the family home in Puteaux to a small apartment at 23, rue Saint-Hippolyte, near the Closerie des Lilas, in those days an ordinary café rather than the smart restaurant it is today, not far from Gertrude Stein’s home in the rue de Fleurus. She met him, and remarked that he looked like a young Englishman (he and his brothers were noticeably natty dressers in those days) and talked ‘very urgently about the fourth dimension’. On a freshly plastered wall of his apartment (the building was still under construction), using precise calculations he had been working on for months, he made a full-scale perspective pencil drawing of what was to be his next major work, The Large Glass. For the next year and a half he continued to add new elements he had worked out in drawings and studies. But his disillusionment persisted. Was all this careful draughtsmanship really art? Nobody else (the judging panels, notably) seemed to think so.

He kept notes, sketches and jottings in a green box which eventually became a work of art in its own right. One jotting read, ‘Can one make works of “art”?’ Was art really the result of rational, calculated construction rather than a matter of unconscious intuition? Independently of his brothers, he began to address the question, working on a piece he called 3 Stoppages étalon. This time without making any preliminary sketches or drawings, he stretched a metre-long length of wire sewing thread taut above a canvas he had painted Prussian blue and let it fall, anyhow, on to a separate canvas, then glued it down with drops of varnish to secure the shape it had made. He saw this novel working process as ‘a first gesture liberating me from the past’; looking back later, he felt Trois Stoppages étalon, in particular, had ‘tapped the mainspring of my future’. He was not the first artist to be concerned with chance – it was a subject Stéphane Mallarmé had already explored in poetry, most notably in Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). But as Duchamp pointed out, everybody’s chance is different: ‘Your chance is not the same as mine, is it?’

His next work may have been a surreptitious challenge (or thumbs-down) to the exponents of the golden section and their preoccupation with not only calculation but velocity. To construct Bicycle Wheel he simply mounted the front wheel of a bicycle upside down on its fork on a kitchen stool. Asked later what he had had in mind, he said he had no particular intention, he just made it for pleasure, ‘something to have in my room, the way you have a fire, or a pencil sharpener, except that there was no usefulness. It was a pleasant gadget, pleasant for the movement it gave.’ Nothing to do, then, with the mathematicians who had inspired theorists of the fourth dimension (and artists including the Duchamp brothers), who as far back as 1827 had experimented with vectors and ways of introducing rotation into three-dimensional points. Or perhaps his comment was a jokey reference to those ideas, since both a fire and a pencil sharpener are effective only in motion – their only similarity with a bicycle wheel. Art might be brought about, then (as the surrealists would soon discover), by undermining art. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that Bicycle Wheel has an unaccountable beauty, suspended on its judiciously proportioned stool like a dancer, perfectly balanced in space.

Two further interventions into the newly pressing question of what art was came about during the winter of 1913–14. Travelling by train one evening, Duchamp noticed two lit windows in the distance. The glow of artificial light in the darkness reminded him of the distinctive quality of colour he had noticed in the liquids used by pharmacists. In an art-supply shop he bought three copies of an unremarkable lithograph of bare trees and a winding stream then added to each copy two dots of bright red and green watercolour, like the fluids in pharmacists’ jars. He called the total work (consisting of all three lithographs) Pharmacy.

If Bicycle Wheel and Pharmacy had come about with minimal intervention by the artist, Bottle Rack required virtually none at all. It was an ordinary cast-iron bottle rack, of the kind used at that time to dry empties before returning them to the local wine shop to be refilled, composed simply of five tiers of upward-pointing branches. Duchamp’s idea this time was to inscribe his bottle rack as if signing a work of art, though with a phrase with no particular meaning, but somehow he never got around to doing it; for the time being, the bottle rack was forgotten. In the meantime, he took a course in library science and got a job as an intern at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the distinguished university library of rare books and archives in the place du Panthéon. When not in the library reading the ancient Greek philosophers, in his Neuilly studio (which he had kept on) he continued work on The Large Glass, as well as making other constructions, including Chocolate Grinder (in two variants), made with roller-drums fashioned out of stretched threads glued down with varnish and sewn to the canvas at the point of intersection at the centre of the drum; and Glider (completed in 1914), built with very fine, malleable lead wire. Meanwhile, Nude Descending … No. 2 had taken on a life of its own. It was already attracting a steadily growing crowd of admirers at the Armory show in New York.

In November 1913 Apollinaire was appointed director of Les Soirées de Paris, an arts magazine which regularly published his contributions. When the magazine moved offices to 278, boulevard Raspail the artists of the district acquired a new meeting place. Everyone gathered there when they were not in the Dôme or the Rotonde – Picasso and his friends, Modigliani, de Chirico and his curious pianist-brother Alberto Savinio, whose technique (according to Apollinaire) consisted of hurling himself in a frenzy at the keyboard. Under Apollinaire’s directorship the 15 December issue of Les Soirées included ‘Lundi rue Christine’, together with photographic reproductions of four of Picasso’s cubist constructions. For the same issue Apollinaire reviewed the autumn salons in both Berlin and Paris, noting of the latter that artists exhibiting included de Chirico, ‘an awkward and very gifted painter … showing some curious landscapes full of new intentions’.

The French art scene was vibrant and exciting and the market was robust, with widening international prospects. French modern art was being introduced successfully into Germany, in galleries in Berlin, Cologne and Munich. Picasso’s work had sold for record prices. By summer 1914 he was in Avignon, experimenting with new forms for still lifes and developing an idea he had been working on that spring, a wax model of an absinthe glass, complete with sugar cube on its slotted spoon. He had six bronzes cast, one thickly coated with what looks like demerara sugar but is in fact sand. The rest he painted inside and out in combinations of flat colour and sprinkled dots. Each cast was different but all were faintly anthropomorphic; some thought they looked like approximations of human heads. Picasso himself insisted his absinthe glasses were just that – absinthe glasses. (For the time being, there was no surrealist to contradict – or endorse – him.)

On 24 May 1914 Apollinaire reported in his daily column for Paris-Journal that a young Russian artist (Natalia Goncharova) had been appointed by Diaghilev to paint sets for the Ballets Russes’s next production. Though he hugely admired Goncharova (and had organized an exhibition of her work), Apollinaire asked his readers the question Cocteau had already asked – why didn’t Diaghilev employ French artists as his scene painters and costume designers? That spring Apollinaire had already reported on the creative vitality of Montparnasse, predicting that in addition to its painters and poets the district would soon have its own nightclubs and singers; he had even heard that someone was about to publish a local journal. By June he was announcing that, as the artistic hub of Paris, Montparnasse was the new Montmartre. On a table in the Closerie des Lilas, Beatrice Hastings noticed a copy of the first issue of ‘Montparnasse, a weekly gazette of literature and the arts’, produced locally for the people of the district (a publication destined, as things turned out, to be short-lived).

For the 14 July 1914 issue of Paris-Journal Apollinaire reported on the emergence of new painters. He focussed primarily on de Chirico’s work, quoting Futurist painter Ardengo Soffici, who, in his review in Lacerba, had noted that de Chirico’s work, uniquely among contemporary painting, could be ‘defined as a language of dreams’. Perhaps he had seen de Chirico’s major painting of 1914, The Song of Love, which depicts an apparently dislocated landscape of arches with a train passing in the distance and in the foreground a Greek sculpture (of Apollo), a green ball and one red surgical rubber glove suspended from a nail. Had the ancient Greek ‘midwife’ of art – the painter – hung up her gloves and abandoned her muse in favour of a different kind of contemplation, and depiction, of the objects of everyday life?

Apollinaire called the article he was writing for the 1 August issue of Paris-Journal ‘Neurosis and Modern Art’, the title of a lecture that was to be given at a ‘university for bathing beauties’ – his little joke; he was in Deauville, commissioned to review the summer season. Should he happen to meet the (unidentified) lecturer, Apollinaire promised his readers, he would urge him to ‘take a good look at our modern painters’, including Duchamp and de Chirico. After that, the learned gentleman would be in a position to decide for himself whether neurosis had anything to do with them. Art was on the brink of posing tantalizing questions – but no sooner had Apollinaire arrived in Deauville than he had turned around and was speeding back to Paris. France was about to go to war.

On 1 August 1914 posters appeared throughout Paris announcing mobilization. In Montparnasse everyone took to the streets. By the next day the atmosphere in the city was frenzied. On the boulevards huge processions formed, with people carrying banners and flags and marching through the streets shouting and chanting. Errand boys on bicycles, old gentlemen, working people, bourgeois and bohemians ran about, everyone roaring at the tops of their voices, ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’ The French would finally (or so they thought) have their chance to avenge Napoleon’s defeat, and the end of the Second Republic, in 1870–71. Artists left their studios and surged into the cafés; the Dôme and the Rotonde were mobbed. Shops lowered their shutters. In the intense heat, crowds gathered on the boulevard Saint-Michel to applaud the military procession, an emblematic Tricolore unfurled, music playing, as the soldiers filed out of the École Militaire on their way to the Gare de l’Est. Buses swayed under the burden of passengers, taxis lined up as if in preparation for sudden departure. As the light faded, the sputtering gas lamps cast their yellow glow across a city that seemed to have gone mad. There was a lull until midnight, then it all burst into life again. In the Bar du Panthéon the orchestra played the tango; soldiers with knapsacks danced awkwardly, staring fixedly ahead. By daybreak, military doctors were seen making their way in uniform to the Gare de l’Est on foot, since all the taxis had already been requisitioned and the trams had stopped. Through the streets went horse patrols, and trucks full of arms and mounted batteries. An astonishing number of cannons were being rolled across the cobbles. In Berlin, cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, in Germany that year with her Jewish husband, made a dash to return home to Paris, crammed into a blisteringly hot express train with hundreds of other French nationals racing through the night to reach the Belgian border before it closed. German artists rushed to do the same. In Cologne, Max Ernst, a young art student (and future surrealist extraordinaire) watched as his friend Hans Arp made it on to the last train to leave Germany. Ernst was to spend the next four years wishing he had done the same.